“Do you have it?” he said, narrowing his eyes.
We were still in the frame of light cast by the open door. Few, however, had seemed to notice our scuffle. Such things in such places were like legs in trousers, part of their very definition. Here, those who stood up often fell down, and the opposite was also true. There were also many, like the Grand Old Duke of York, who did neither, and indeed were not able to locate themselves in either the spatial or the temporal world. Ongeshnoshket. Three sheets to the wind.
We went with Jacome, now tottering on his hindquarters, to a table in shadows and effected the transfer. Jacome took the sack and concealed it beneath his shirt. Portly, he had become book-bellied. He quickly left the tavern.
After, that is, ordering a mug of ale, convincing Moishe to pay, then sloshing it down the hatchway of his greedy throat.
Chapter Six
The following morning we travelled to meet the painter in a Mozarabic palace newly collected by Isabella since the fall of Granada. Upon entering, we looked to the horizon, empty except for a few sheepish and indistinct clouds hovering above a bare and misshapen tree. The painter leaned in close, his brush twitching only slightly, his eyes only half open.
He was adding leaves.
If we had wished for blood to paint them autumn, we could have skewered him, so intent was he on each tiny leaf. Sha, we could have had children with him before he noticed and looked up.
By now, Moishe knew how to cough in at least three languages. So, he coughed. The effect was immediate. The painter twitched oily green across the edge of the sky. “Ach! May your kugel cook in hell.”
Then he pointed at an ornate chair. “Sit.”
Moishe looked warily around the room. He’d learned to check for exits, unless aboard ship. The sea was both escape enough and no escape. There was a door at the end of the chamber. “The Queen is not at the palace?”
“Today,” the painter said, “there is another parade to celebrate the Reconquista.”
“Will they also dance in the streets when the Jews are gone?” Moishe asked.
“As they did in Hamelin when the rats left,” the painter said. “Now, sit.” This time, Moishe sat. The painter turned and repaired the sky.
“If only such feats could be wrought outside of the canvas,” he said and put down his brushes. “I am Se?or Rui Fernández, painter, yes, he that painted for Do?a Gracia, but together we worked on greater trickery than mere perspective and flattery. For some years, the Do?a and I have arranged safe passage for oppressed and fire-bound Jews. The Do?a with the ships of her late husband and brother-in-law who disappeared, likely tied to stone or iron, dropped into the deep. We could lay the foundation for new Jerusalems from such seabones as have collected there.
“I am Fernández, yes, and cousin to that Sarah who you tried to help. I, too, have spoken with this would-be world-finder Columbus. I will travel with him, through the Pillars of Hercules, across Ocean Sea and beyond history’s vanishing point. With the Do?a gone, there are no more rescue ships. And, in truth, this dark tide has already washed my heart to sea, and only habit keeps blood moving through me.”
There was a great clattering in the courtyard.
Important people, or perhaps more correctly, the self-important, move either with preternatural silence or with profligate sound. I flew to the window. Bright colours. Hammered metal. Flourishes of cut-sleeved brocade. The landed had landed and they were coming toward us.
“Who is it?” I asked.
Fernández: “That’s a clever bird.”
A pageboy was on the steps of the chamber. Moishe ran to the door that he’d previously charted as a sally port for use in sudden storm.
It was locked.
I flew to the rafters. Birds and clouds can hide in the sky. Moishe would have to learn from the painter’s horizon and become background. He pressed himself against the wall, miming grout or shadow.
“Se?or Fernández, our queen arrives. She grants you time and her noble visage for the painting of her portrait,” the page said.
The painter rose in anticipation and soon the royal cortège bustled in. A couple songbird-resplendent maidels-in-waiting, some hildagos, many pages, two priests and Torquemada, Grand biltong-dry Inquisitor of the Holy Office, and the Queen: short, strong, blue-eyed, with hair like the auburn planks of a ship. She had the self-assurance of a statue of herself, though far beneath the staid mantel of steady piety there appeared to be a fiery and excitable core.
“Su Majestad Católica es muy generosa. Your Catholic Majesty is most generous,” Fernández said, bowing low, and with perhaps a slightly ironic curve to his painterly spine.
But it might have been artistic foreshortening.