In flagrante delicto. We were caught with our hand in the seder jar, our fingers in the sweet wine.
Moishe, having been on red alert for such capes dived below the horizon of the table. I remained a bird and flew to the crow’s nest of a sconce, waiting to see what might transpire, how I might help or hinder.
Each burlyman grabbed someone. It was a country dance of thugs, the priests calling the tune. An arm wrapped around the throat of the old man, Joshua.
“Take my breath, I keep my belief,” he said as he was pulled down.
The fabric of Rebecca’s soft shoulders served as reins as she was driven into the wall then kicked. Alonso was clutched by the elbow but he knocked away the grober’s gorilla hand and ran to protect his wife. Immediately he was surrounded and a fist struck him a mighty boch. He sank like a stone to the floor. His wife screamed.
“May you live to see your children die.”
She lifted the long silver carving knife from the table and plunged it into the thick side of a shtarker. A short-lived revenge for they pulled her arms behind her and bound them tight. The wounded man staggered then collapsed onto a chair, clutching his pierced side. Both Alonso and his wife were weeping.
“This travesty of Easter, this Last Supper, shall indeed be your last,” a priest shrieked above the tumult to no one and everyone. “I charge you in the name of the Holy Office with heresy and Judaizing. With harbouring enemies of the King and Queen, the Church, and of the Holy Father. With murder.”
Do?a Gracia was standing at the end of the table. Motionless, a proud statue radiating power and strength, she had both gravitas and gravitational pull. Space-time turned around her. She had not been touched by the Inquisition.
“Friend, do what you have come to do,” she said, looking at the priest.
It was only a moment before it registered on the priest’s face. The Gospel of Matthew. The words of Jesus to Judas.
Then they came and laid hands on her and seized her and it seemed that time began to move twice as quickly. Some ran for hallways and doors, took up chairs, knives, their own swords. An Inquisition enforcer rushed toward the woman named Leah and she thrust a Haggadah with a great zets at his head. He bent over and she ran, but she was seized by another and bound also. Daniel slashed with a dagger but was quickly overpowered. Moishe had escaped notice below the deck of the table. His dark eyes glinted from the shadows like a rat’s and caught my gaze. It was time for him to make his move. I swept across the room, shrieking the excoriating cry of the harpy. Swords slashed behind my tail as they attempted to cut me from the air. I embedded my claws into a soft face and heard the raw howl.
Moishe, still a rodent, scrabbled on his knees and dove down the stairs in the direction of the cellar.
The room was a torrent of slashing sword and I feared I would soon be diced for lobscouse. In Egypt, it was Moses who burned his tongue on a coal, but here it was Aaron who would eat fire.
What is more powerful than guns or swords?
Darkness.
And in the right circumstances, it can be rendered with a bisl gob of bird spit. I swept from candle to candle, extinguishing flame. And then in that sudden night, I followed the rat I was loyal to, and went underground.
We stumbled to the cellar, Moishe feeling a path past rolled carpets, barrels and chairs. He crouched in the corner.
“I should have helped,” he said. “I should have fought to save the others.”
We heard a sound from outside the room, footsteps from somewhere down the passage.
They say that if a baby falls beneath an ox or an elephant, a fearful mother can find strength beyond the weight of matter or of death. And if there’s a bottle of rum beneath a boulder, a shikker drunk can find his strength, too. Moishe fingered his way along the back wall of the room and found the immoveable door. He moved what had likely not been moved for lifetimes. It shifted but a rib cage’s breadth, and he slid himself through the opening.
It was difficult to close the door again, but Moishe managed, hauling on the handle like a sailor hoisting anchor, the door having been reminded of its own possibility.
Chapter Nineteen
“Is this my fault?” Moishe said.
“Moishe, like they say: Noch der chupeh iz shpet di charoteh. After the wedding it’s too late for regrets. Like any story, we must now figure what happens next.”
Voices in the hall?
Only our own nervous breathing in the dark and dusty room.
Then something close clashed against metal.
A few sparks. Moishe had a small tinderbox open and was striking flint with the firesteel. On one knee, the black charcloth was spread beneath a few splinters of tinder wood. On the other, the squat nub of a candle.
With each spark, a small dim circle. Shelves of some kind, barely visible.
Finally, Moishe was able to light the cloth, transfer the fire to the tinder and then to the candle. A small thought passed about in dim whispers.
The flame was a living thing, trembling like an old rabbi.