If beauty is skin deep, then this mamaleh should be freylech joyful for the thick Kevlar of fashion that saved her. Her frock, a fat sheath that denied a happy ending to the shtupping knife, nevertheless granted one to its wearer.
The page hog-tied, the other pages began to flock around him. The hidalgos awoke, their swords drawn, and carried the afraid knot of youth to the cell where he would be imprisoned until execution, executed until death.
In this way, he would learn. A permanent lesson.
“Ach,” as Moishe would say. “Nifter-shmifter, a leben macht er.”
What’s it matter? As long as he makes a living.
Moishe stood in the centre of a circle of the Queen’s cortège. He was no longer background, nor invisible.
Moishe: Murderer. Freedom fighter. Fugitive.
Hero.
He reached over to the pierced lady-in-waiting and pulled out the dagger.
“A memento?” he said, holding it before her. “But not a memento mori.”
“You have performed a great deed for me, for Castile and, I trust, for King Ferdinand,” Isabella said. “What is your name and whom do you serve? Where is this lord?”
A broch. Moishe had to play this well else he share a death with the hog-tied page. And death, like music, can be shared equally by all who experience it. There is never a shortage. Life is the only thing that comes up short.
“Majesty. I am Miguel Levante,” he said, bowing low. “Whether I bear wine for a priest at chapel,” he said, rising slowly, “bring supper to a Duke in chambers, or lift sword to protect a ship from pirates, I serve my Lord God, my Queen, and her noble husband, King Ferdinand.”
I kvelled. I was proud. I had taught him well. He stood before her, confident and gracious. His slim yet sturdy body. His dark hair and monkey-butt beard. He pronounced Spanish trippingly yet without tripping. And meant none of it.
He had grown into a real mensch.
A true parrot.
“Your Excellency,” he bowed before Torquemada who had promised he would burn if seen again. But Moishe acted with such quiet calm and chutzpah that Torquemada, half fardreyt by the wash of ghosts, did not appear to recognize him.
The Queen motioned to a stunted nebbish of a man whose marmoset punim face was frozen in an expression of surprise and distaste. “Feh” seemed emblazoned on his lips.
The man reached into his doublet and procured a testicular sack that he presented before the Queen. She raised three fingers whereupon he retrieved three gold coins from within Her Majesty’s scrotum and held them distastefully before Moishe.
“I shall remember your name, Miguel Levante,” she said. “I give you this token of our gratitude.” She nodded to the nebbish who then presented the coins. “Perhaps you serve the wind or the ocean and yet no man,” she continued. “Or perhaps your master is the same as he whom you have thwarted, but yet you took a different road when the deed was close. I do not know, but God and queens forgive and reward those who choose the right path.
“This noon, our Grand Inquisitor, our sometime confessor, Torquemada, begins travel to Cordoba. I wish that you ride with him—we will provide you with a mule—and will send word to a soldier of mine who performed great service at Grenada, Gonzalo Fernández de Córdoba who is now at Loja. You will there be given a position and an opportunity.”
What could Moishe do? He bowed and thanked her Majesty.
A nar git un a kluger nemt. A fool gives but the clever one takes.
Or gets out of town before the fool becomes clever and the clever one is skewered.
Chapter Seven
Late afternoon on the road to Cordoba. Moishe, a shnook on a mule in procession with various priests, shtarkers and servants on their way to hunt hidden Jews and sundry heretical bandersnatches.
Leading them, the Imperial Red Wizard, Torquemada, a breastless wraith riding a black bruiser of an Andalusian horse with a whorl of white like a galaxy on its forehead.
“It is said to be unlucky for a horse to have a marking that it itself cannot see,” he said to the Inquisitor.
“I am a Christian and so do not believe in superstition,” Torquemada replied.
At this, I held my tongue, though the temptation was great.
“But, I know who you are,” he continued. “Unlucky one, for whom death was not enough. You who seek to create the world anew. I have sent word to the Queen. You and this Genoese Quixote, Christophorus Columbus, shall sail into the west with the sinking sun, far from our work and those whom we serve. Perhaps this sun will not disappear but shall rise again over the Indies and Cathay. Perhaps it will burn over a new land. Perhaps, like any thousand-faced hero, in time, you shall return. This is no concern of mine as I shall be gone. Already it is only dust and disgust which hold my old bones together as I wait for the end.”
Torquemada folded suddenly as if his spine had turned to sand. The wizened crab of his hand disappeared into a saddlebag.