The Devils of Cardona by Matthew Carr Page B

have robbed them. They wouldn’t have carved them up like this and carried them up to the road for every pilgrim to see.”
    â€œThe Redeemer?” Mendoza suggested.
    â€œOh, so you’ve heard about our Morisco avenger? Who knows? There are all kinds of wild stories going around the villages about this man. That he hides in a magic cave whose entrance opens and closes on command and rides a green horse and is armed with a scimitar. Some say he’s seven feet tall and has four fingers on his right hand. There are even those whowill tell you that he isn’t a man at all but the ghost of Tariq ibn Ziyad, come to reconquer Spain for the Moors. Of course, when you actually ask around, you find that nobody’s actually seen him—they’ve just heard of someone who has. These are simple people, Bernardo, people of the mountains. Some of them still believe that the high peaks are filled with dragons and monsters.”
    â€œAnd you? What do you believe?”
    Calvo shrugged. “Well, these bodies are real. And they weren’t killed for their money. Those shepherds weren’t rich.”
    Mendoza had intended to continue to Belamar that same day, but Calvo now pressed him to stay for supper and offered to find them rooms in a local inn that was used by pilgrims. The prospect of a bed and good food swayed Mendoza, and that night they ate at the corregidor’s well-appointed house. Unlike the viceroy, Calvo did not stand on ceremony, and Necker, Gabriel and the militiamen were also allowed to eat with him and his wife. Calvo had not been married when Mendoza last saw him, and his Dutch wife, Cornelia, was definitely something of a catch for a man who was not the most imposing physical specimen. She looked at least ten years younger than Calvo, with lustrous blond hair and creamy white skin and a voluptuous figure that her loose-fitting robes accentuated, to the obvious admiration of her husband’s guests.
    Mendoza found her less appealing. He disliked the way that she flirted with Ventura and the two militiamen as if her husband were not there. He noticed how Calvo gave her endearing looks that she did not reciprocate as he told anecdotes that were obviously designed to impress her with his manliness and boldness, about their student days in Salamanca and tavern brawls and scrapes with tutors, about his attempts to serenade the ladies accompanied by Mendoza on guitar.
    These reminiscences inevitably turned to Lepanto. Calvo delivered a colorful and exciting account of the battle that reminded Mendoza of the stories he had once told in Salamanca taverns. He described the sultan’sships spread out in a crescent shape across the Gulf of Patras with their sails billowing in a great curtain, the tambours and cymbals beating out the rowers’ strokes from the Turkish decks, the turbaned soldiers dancing and brandishing their weapons in anticipation of the battle as they waited on the walkways.
    Calvo told his wife and guests how the Christians broke the fetters that held their galley slaves so that they could use their chains as weapons and promised freedom to those who survived, how the Turkish arrows bounced off their boarding nets, how Don John danced a gay galliard in full view of the enemy before boarding the Turkish flagship, how the huge Venetian gunships blasted the Turkish galleys at the center of the sultan’s fleet, wreaking terrible damage. Gabriel was spellbound, but Mendoza found these recollections oppressive. War stories told at suppertime might be entertaining, but Calvo’s narrative did not include the thrashing of the bosun’s bullwhip on the backs of the slaves as they crashed into the corsair ships, the exploding grenades and incendiaries and the screams of men jumping from burning ships with their clothes on fire into the churning red waters among the entrails of their own comrades where they were stabbed with pikes, shot dead by harquebusiers or