The Devils of Cardona by Matthew Carr Page B

know how to use it.”
    â€œI do, sir.” Necker tapped the hilt of the shorter Landsknecht sword that hung from his left side and the pistol that hung from the other. “And I also know how to use these.”
    Mendoza now explained the purpose of the investigation for the first time. Daniel and Martín did not look pleased to hear that they would be away from their homes for some weeks and possibly months in the Morisco lands of Aragon, but the devout Necker’s face darkened when Mendoza told them that a priest had been murdered.
    â€œSo Moors did this?” he growled.
    â€œThat’s what we are going to Aragon to find out.” He noticed that Martín was looking at him with a perplexed expression. “You have a question, Constable?”
    â€œYes, sir. Where is Aragon, sir?”
    â€œIt’s in the Pyrenees. Next to France.”
    Martín looked none the wiser. “Where is France?” he asked.
    â€œYou just keep heading north,” Ventura explained, pointing in that direction. “Until you bump into some mountains. Then you cross them.”
    After loading their mules and horses, they rode slowly back to the Palace of the Chancery to pick up the expenses for the journey. Outside the main entrance, horses and carriages were lined up on the street, accompanied by their drivers and servants, and they followed two handcuffed prisoners who were being led to trial by their guards into the main patio, which was thronged with lawyers, judges and
oidores
in black robes and clients, plaintiffs and defendants waiting for civil and criminal cases, some of whom were already shouting and arguing with one another as notaries and scriveners hurried back and forth clutching sheaves of papers.
    It was the usual bedlam, and Mendoza thought that he would not be sorry to be away from it for a while as he and Necker pushed through the crowd to the accountant’s office. They returned to the waiting horses, carrying four bulging bags of coins, and Mendoza turned his back on the king’s courts and led the expedition out of the city, toward the Crown of Aragon and the distant mountains where His Majesty’s laws were being flouted.

CHAPTER FOUR

    rom the gallery overlooking the Patio of Santa Isabel, Inquisitor Mercader looked down at the ornate hedges and orange trees, the bubbling water fountain and the white marble walkways with their lobed Moorish arches. As always they charmed and soothed him, and the fact that they had been built by Moors did not detract from his enjoyment. On the contrary it seemed to him a fitting outcome that the Aljafería Palace that the infidel invaders had constructed centuries ago in Zaragoza and inscribed with prayers to Allah and his false prophet had now become the headquarters of the Inquisition of Aragon. If anything this transformation only enhanced the pleasure that he took in the serrated stucco workings, the geometrical designs and gold-paneled ceilings.
    Such buildings were no longer possible in Spain, not since the last conversions of the Aragonese Moors in thesecond decade of the century. Some of their mosques and public buildings had already been torn down or reconditioned centuries before, and those that remained had undergone the same fate. But it was no bad thing to retain some reminders of what had once been and never could be again, and the massive walls and towers and the defensive ditch provided a formidable barrier against an Aragonese population that, unlike that of Castile, had never wanted the Holy Office in the first place and still resented its presence after nearly a century.
    Beyond these walls lay a kingdom infected with heresy and sedition, where Moriscos brazenly followed the law of Muhammad with the complicity of their Christian masters. And nowhere was the infection more advanced than in Cardona, in the mountains of the far north where the infidel Moor known as the Redeemer had called upon the Moriscos to rise up and