The Queen's Vow: A Novel of Isabella of Castile (40 page)

But all too soon the New Year arrived; before the snows had even thawed, Fernando departed with our newly equipped force, pared to lean precision. The fierce Moors on their jennets were joined to our cavalry; the German cannon and Italian gunpowder were on ox-drawn carts; the oiled siege engines and catapults wheeled behind the serpentine procession of iron and blades like unwieldy giants.

Once again I took up residence in Tordesillas; once again I was receiving my news from couriers, waiting, always waiting, for the next dispatch.

The war began with promise. The Portuguese had grown slack in the intervening months, fatted on the plunder of our looted cities, and in a bold step, Fernando quickly seized Zamora. Afonso sallied forth from neighboring Toro in high temper, engaging us in a flurry of arms, all aimed at distracting us while his enterprising son managed to sneak past our border patrols. To my furious disbelief, he arrived with reinforcements from Portugal. Suddenly, the army we had spent eight painstaking months assembling was outnumbered, surrounded on all sides by an ocean of the enemy.

Fernando bid a hasty retreat behind Zamora’s stout medieval walls. I immediately sent reserve squadrons to harass the Portuguese and send them scurrying back to Toro. I hoped to secure Fernando an opening salvo, but after three weeks of skirmishes and hot words flung at each other from across walls, it became clear that if Afonso—trapped in Toro, in unbearable cold—was not winning anything, neither were we. In fact, the last of the gold we’d borrowed from the Church was fast dwindling and Fernando, holed up in Zamora, which the prior Portuguese occupation had emptied of everything edible, was starting to feel the pinch. Communication between us was nearly impossible; but one or two of his couriers did manage to reach me.

We may have to start eating our horses
, he wrote,
if something doesn’t break soon
.

I knew this time he would indeed do just that before he gave up. I ordered every castle within a hundred miles of Zamora and Toro either
occupied or demolished. I then posted garrisons at every crossroads, denying the Portuguese all escape routes other than the way they had first come. I also issued decrees threatening to hang any man, woman, or child, commoner or grandee, who dared offer so much as a crust of bread to the invaders.

At night, with the candles guttering and my fingers cramping from writing letters to the nobles, petitions to the cities, and declarations to the people, all aimed at staving off any thought of compromise with the Portuguese, I went to the chapel and anchored myself before the altar. I did not lift any pleas. I did not barter or promise. Shutting my eyes, I let the silence, encompassing and profound, wash over me.

I barely slept. When I did, I dreamed of our ancient battle cry of “Santiago!” drowned out by ringing swords, the shrieking of horses, the sucking sensation underfoot as the earth churned into a swamp of blood and mud. I awoke gasping, fists grasping the sheets.

I could lose him, I thought. Fernando could die.

On a blustery March morning, almost two months since Fernando had taken Zamora, Inés brought a messenger to me. He was just a boy, no more than twelve; as he fell to his knees at my feet, drenched to his skin from the rain outside, I noticed with sudden heart-pounding irrelevance that his cloak was so filthy I couldn’t distinguish its color.

“Majestad,”
he whispered, in a voice of utter exhaustion. He extended a scrap of paper, flecked with mud and rust-colored stains.

As I took it, I had to remind myself to breathe.

There was no seal. Feeling Inés’s anxious gaze on me, I turned to the pale light of the window and held the paper up to it. I let a moment pass. Whatever this missive said, I must not crumble. I must not faint or weep. I must be strong. Fernando would expect that from me, just as I would from him.

I opened the missive. I read three words:

I RODE OUT
at once to meet him. By then I’d learned that Afonso had ordered a retreat because my cutting off of his supply lines and the razing of the surrounding castles had denied the Portuguese any chance of
haven. Fernando pursued him; the armies clashed in a marshland pass, where our men fought with such a ferocity that, outnumbered as we were, we proved lethal.

Afonso fled across the border to his realm, bemoaning his losses. More than half of his men had perished, their weapons and other belongings purloined for our treasury. Later, I would discover that Joanna la Beltraneja had also escaped to Portugal to seek asylum at her betrothed’s court; I vowed she would never set foot in Castile again unless she came as my prisoner.

When I saw Fernando on the raw wood dais near the battle site, haggard but smiling in his rich red damask, his chin lifted with the pride of one who has proven himself, I had to stop myself from rushing to him. This time, our reunion was imbued with the ceremonial regality he had earned as a warrior. After we clasped hands, we turned to the applauding soldiers to receive the tattered standard of Portugal, whose bearer had been hacked to pieces defending it. I promised to consecrate a new cathedral in Toledo with it to commemorate our triumph. Then we heard Mass for all those who had lost their lives and went home to Segovia, to reunite with our daughter and our court.

At long last, Castile was ours.

CHAPTER TWENTY-FIVE

T
he Moors have an old saying: Before a man dies, he must see Sevilla. I would add that the same goes for a woman, and in the summer of 1477, I finally got my chance.

The previous year had been one of ceaseless labor as Fernando and I contended with the aftermath of the Portuguese war. We traveled nonstop, chastising larcenous nobles who’d lent Afonso covert aid and tearing down their fortresses, thereby depriving them of the luxury of stout walls to hide behind. Too many private castles had sprung up in Castile during the lawless years of my father’s and Enrique’s reigns—some of the grandees still fancied themselves above the crown itself. They exacted tribute from surrounding villages like feudal warlords, studding the landscape with defensive aeries which they filled with retainers beholden only to them. Some had even refused our call to arms during the Portuguese invasion and, in the wake of the war, Fernando and I decided it was time to teach them a lesson they’d not soon forget. We declared that only those castles officially sanctioned by us could remain standing. If the lords did not take it upon themselves to demolish their illicit holdings, we would do it for them—and level a heavy fine on the owner as well, as punishment.

We also summoned the Cortes to further refine our fiscal and legal systems and to revive the citizen-led Santa Hermandad, a law-enforcement institution which, like so much in Castile, had fallen into disorder. Through the Hermandad, we sought to restore order in our far-flung provinces by hunting down renegade mercenaries and other assorted criminals and villains. Gradually, city by city, town by town, hamlet by hamlet—sometimes, it seemed, stone by stone—we subsumed Castile under our authority.

Chastened and deserted by his Portuguese allies, Diego Villena
came to court to beg our forgiveness on his knees. He stood to lose everything, and unlike his father he did not have the fickle Enrique to rely upon. Though Fernando argued we should take his head, I reasoned that by restoring Villena’s aristocratic privileges, we’d win noble support by demonstrating we were also capable of mercy even in the face of outright treason. It was a risky venture but it paid off; soon after, several of the noblemen who had resisted our order to reduce their holdings came before us, albeit grudgingly, to swear their allegiance.

As for Archbishop Carrillo, he expressed no remorse. He left me with no alternative than to order him to renounce all worldly vanities and take permanent residence in the Monastery of San Francisco in Alcalá, under pain of imprisonment. Broken by his own actions and deserted by all, including his servants, who fled into the night carrying off his few remaining assets, he did not disobey my order, going into the Franciscan cloister under guard, to live out the rest of his days in impoverished oblivion. As much as I regretted that so bold a churchman and warrior should have been brought so low by his own inability to conform, I did not spare him any pity. Unlike Villena, whose youth and brash nature had thrown him into reckless alliance with Afonso of Portugal, Carrillo’s involvement had been a deliberate act of revenge against me because I had chosen Fernando’s counsel over his. This time, there could be no forgiveness.

Nevertheless, even with Carrillo permanently removed and our plan to rebuild the kingdom proceeding apace, I continued to struggle with my own private turmoil. I’d not conceived again since my miscarriage and the expert physicians I had consulted were unable to offer a satisfactory explanation. They all advised that I should rest more and dedicate myself to pursuits better suited to the delicate feminine temperament; the supposition, it seemed, was that a woman who behaved like a man somehow proscribed conception—something I found absurd. Surely fulfilling my duty as a queen regnant did not preclude my ability to carry out my womanly functions as God intended.

Nevertheless, anxiety ate at me, especially when Fernando and I made love. With Ines’s covert assistance, I procured foul-tasting verbena drafts to balance my humors. I doubled my quota of prayers. I even rode north to Burgos in a blinding storm to visit the isolated chapel of
San Juan de Ortega, which contained a primitive stone relief believed to depict a woman in childbirth. I knelt for hours on the icy flagstones in front of it, requesting succor. I donated funds to build a larger church in the saint’s name. But my womb did not stir. My menses remained irregular, as they’d always been, but the blood inevitably came, often with such force I had to clench my jaw against the pain. I could not understand why God, who had granted us so much, who had steered us to victory over Portugal, would deny Fernando and me that one blessing we most craved—a prince who could inherit our crowns after our deaths, uniting Castile and Aragón forever.

Eventually, Fernando noticed my preoccupation. At night in our chambers after the audiences were over and our bejeweled regalia was discarded, he murmured reassuring words to try and quiet my anguish.

“It will happen when the time is right,” he whispered as I lay in his arms, inert as stone. “My love, we will have a son when God wills it so.”

I wanted to yell, cry, break things; anything to vent my sorrow and frustration. It did not help when I discovered that his liaison in Aragón had resulted in another boy; that even as he’d pursed his lips and sent the messenger off with a gift for the child, pretending it meant nothing, it confirmed his virility and my failure to give him what that other woman had.

By the summer of 1477, I could scarcely look at him, at anyone. I was so miserable that I almost rejoiced when urgent word arrived that another feud between Andalucía’s most powerful noblemen—the duke of Medina Sidonia and the marquis of Cádiz—had broken out.

Fernando was taken aback when I informed him I wished to personally orchestrate a lasting reconciliation between the southern lords. We’d already decided to eradicate the last remnants of noble resistance in Extremadura, so it was out of the question that we should both be absent from Castile at this crucial time. But if Fernando could not go, I was determined to. He sought to dissuade me, citing the dangers inherent on traveling into the lawless, Moorish-plagued region of Andalucía, but I would not be swayed. I kissed him and my bewildered Isabel goodbye, packed up my household, saddled Canela, and fled south.

South, into the blazing white heat—into the profligate garden of Andalucía, where pomegranates, figs, dates, and lemons glistened on
trees like gems on a sultana’s throat; south, where whitewashed cities cradled aquamarine bays, and I could be alone with my grief.

I’d heard the tales of Sevilla, of course. Who had not? It was one of our oldest and largest cities, the former capital of the Moorish invaders before King Fernando III expelled them in the thirteenth century. Built on the banks of the emerald-hued Guadalquivir, where trade from Africa and the Levant, from far-flung England and the Low Countries sailed into its port every day, Sevilla was a white-hued confection of filigreed towers and lattice balconies that hung over winding streets; shaded by magnificent palms and the bitter orange trees whose thick fruit was inedible yet when distilled yielded an intoxicating fragrance. Here, violence and blood-debt—those twin coins of Andalucía—simmered under the city’s gilded surface; here, in the heart of a world where long ago the Moor, Jew, and Christian had found a brief rapport, anything was possible.

I had expected to be awed by the famous city of reflections, to breathe in its intoxicating orange-scented air and be transported to a time when divisions between faiths and skin tones blurred. And I was. But I did not tell anyone as I first disembarked from my barge on the Magdalena Bridge, where the populace had gathered to welcome me with showers of rose petals and the strumming of guitars, that Sevilla’s beauty did more than affect me. As I stood there before the city’s magnificent open gates, I finally felt a feeling inside me that I had feared I’d lost forever—a fiery leap that quickened my very blood.