Torquemada by Howard Fast Page A

days in Spain, one has enough of it. God, it’s hot! It doesn’t seem to affect you at all.”
    â€œOne gets used to it,” Alvero replied. “Where are you off to now, good friend?”
    â€œFrance and then home.”
    â€œI noticed before,” Alvero said, “that you arc in a hurry to leave Spain.”
    â€œI become afraid in Spain,” Van Sitten said. “It’s not a good feeling.”
    â€œFear is a crazy master,” Alvero said.
    â€œSo is death.”
    â€œYou are not facing death.”
    â€œI think Spain is,” Van Sitten said. “I think Spain is dying. I think that if you had an ounce of sense, Alvero, you would ride with me.”
    Alvero shook his head, but remained silent. They rode on together and Van Sitten continued to argue his point. He said that if only Alvero would come with him, he would wait until tomorrow and Alvero could make arrangements for his family. His fear was now on the edge of sanity and Alvero did his best to calm him. At last they came to a parting of the ways. The road to the north took a left-hand fork and the Priory of Torquemada lay a half mile to the right. They shook hands and said goodbye. Alvero sat on his horse and watched Van Sitten ride away. Once Van Sitten stopped and turned and looked at Alvero, and, in reply to his unspoken question, Alvero shook his head. Then Van Sitten rode on and presently a bend in the road hid him from sight. Alvero spurred his horse and rode toward the monastery.
    The monastery stood on flat land, surrounded by great gardens of fruit trees, olive trees and grape vines. Their robes hitched up to uncover their legs to the knees, their sleeves rolled back, the brown-skinned, bald-pated monks worked in the gardens. They hardly glanced up as Alvero passed by, and he rode his horse through them as if he and they occupied separate planes of existence.
    Alvero dismounted and led his horse towards the cloister, where there was a tremendous hitchstone with iron rings set in its side. He tied his horse and walked through the cloister to the wooden doors of the monastery. Just now, the place was inhumanly silent, the only sound being the scraping of the mattocks of the working monks as they dug in the soil. Alvero opened the heavy wooden doors and entered.
    At first after he had passed through the doors, he walked in Stygian blackness. He stood for a while, waiting for his eyes to accustom themselves to the dark, and then he made his way on until, turning a corner, he found a long, shadowed passageway, lit by broad beams of light let in through glassless windows. He stood waiting there for a moment, the light playing over his hands and wrists, and then a monk appeared at the other end of the passageway and came towards him. The monk walked slowly through the passageway until he was a few feet from where Alvero stood. Then the monk waited in silence, neither questioning nor suggesting.
    â€œI want to see Father Thomas,” Alvero said.
    The monk appeared to think about this for a while. The monk was a bald, brown-skinned man with a thick neck and a flat, peasant face. He was of the type that is as old as the soil of Spain itself, and as fixed in perseverance, and as untroubled emotionally. After he had thought about Alvero’s request sufficiently, he nodded and beckoned for Alvero to follow him, and then he led Alvero down the passageway to a door that was marked with a purple cross. The monk made a sign for Alvero to wait, and then he opened the door and went into the room. Half a minute later he was back and nodded for Alvero to enter; and after Alvero had entered, the monk, remaining outside, closed the door behind him.
    Alvero found himself in an austere room, about thirty feet wide and some twenty feet deep. The door through which he had entered was placed at about the centre of the room’s width. Facing the door, high on the wall, was a row of windows which were glazed in coloured glass.