Purity of Blood

Now there was an unmistakable scent of scorching meat on the air, and I was the roast. Once again, I wanted to say no, but this time I could not get the words out, and I had to shake my head. But my prosecutor, or whatever he was, did not change expression.

“And you deny that you and your fellows are a part of that Judaic conspiracy?”

At that, as frightened as I was—which was not a little—I was slightly irritated.

“I am a Basque, and an old Christian,” I protested. “As good as my father, who was a soldier, and who died in the king’s war.”

The inquisitor gave a dismissive wave of his hand, as if every Christian died in the king’s wars, and that meant nothing at all. Then the thin, till now silent, priest leaned toward the questioner, whispered a few words into his ear, and the younger man nodded respectfully. He turned toward me, and for the first time spoke. His tone was so menacing and cavernous that all at once I saw the young priest as the non plus ultra of understanding and sympathy.

“Repeat your name,” the lean priest ordered.

“Íñ…Íñigo.” I was so frightened by the Dominican’s severe gaze, the feverish eyes sunken deep in the sockets, that I had stumbled over my own name. He continued, implacable.

“Íñigo and what more.”

“Íñigo Balboa.”

“And your mother’s name.”

“Her name is Amaya Aguirre, Reverend Father.”

I had already gone through all this, it was in the papers, so the repetitions made me even more apprehensive. The priest gave me a fierce, strangely satisfied look.

“Balboa,” he said, “is a Portuguese family name.”

The ground seemed to drop from beneath my feet, for I did not have to be told the effect of that poisonous dart. It was true that my surname was common on the Portuguese border, a region that my grandfather had left to enlist under the banners of the king. Suddenly—I have previously told Your Mercies that I was a bright enough lad—all the ramifications of my situation blazed with such meridional clarity that if there had been an open door I would have shot out of it like a flash.

Out of the corner of my eye, I glanced toward the rack, sitting to one side, waiting. That the Inquisition never used it as punishment but, rather, as an instrument for extracting the truth was a fact I did not find comforting. My one hope was that according to the rules of the Holy Office itself, torture could not be used against people of good reputation, royal ministers, pregnant women, servants—to make them inform against their masters—or anyone younger than fourteen…that is, me. But I was close to that fateful fourteenth, and if these men were capable of finding me Jewish ancestors, they could at their whim add the necessary months to make me eligible for their rope trick. And though the rack made men sing, it was not exactly a guitar.

“My father was not Portuguese,” I protested. “He was a soldier from León, like his father, who at the end of a campaign remained in Oñate and married there. A soldier and an old Christian.”

“That is what everyone says.”

Then I heard the scream. It was the terrible scream of a desperate woman, muffled by distance but so piercing that it found its way along passages and corridors and through a closed door. As if they heard nothing, my inquisitors kept looking at me, unperturbed. And I shivered with fear when the lean priest shifted his eyes toward the rack and then back to me.

“How old are you?” he asked.

The scream came again, a whiplash of horror, and yet again there was no reaction from the others, as if I had been the only one who had heard. Deep in their malevolent sockets, the Dominican’s fanatic eyes were two sentences of death at the stake. I trembled as if I had ague.

“Th-thirteen,” I stammered.

There was an anguishing silence, broken only by the scratching of the scribe’s pen. I hope he put it down right, I thought. Thirteen, not one year more.

That was when the thin priest bore in on me. His eyes gleamed even more brilliantly, with a new and unexpected glitter of scorn and loathing.

“And now,” he said, “we are going to talk about Captain Alatriste.”

VI. SAN GINÉS ALLEY

The gaming house was swarming with people betting their asses, even their souls. Amid the buzz of conversations and the coming and going of cardsharps and bootlickers hoping for tips, Juan Vicuña, a former sergeant of the horse guard wounded at Nieuwpoort, was crossing the room, trying to avoid spilling the Toro wine he was carrying in a jug, and looking around with satisfaction. On the half-dozen tables, cards and dice and money were changing hands, inspiring sighs, Holy Mothers! and flashes of naked greed. Gold and silver coins shone beneath the tallow lamps suspended from the domed brick ceiling, and business was all he could ask.