The Crown of Valencia Read online

  God, why hadn’t I ridden my own horse? Every hour Elena rode back halfway between us, waited a second, then returned to the front, as if that act could tug us along more quickly. Finally she pranced Matamoros all the way back to the wagon.

  “Now my wife’s cousin in Calahora, the one who’s not married to Marta’s third cousin, she was to marry this wheelwright, but would you believe a hussy from Toledo snatched him away right before the wedding? Yes, she did. The poor señorita, she says—”

  “José!” Elena’s face was dark with frustration. “Can you not get these blasted mules to move faster? Alfonso will conquer Cordoba before we even reach Burgos.”

  “Oh, Don Luis, these are sensitive mules, they are. Best not to be cursing ’em”

  “Luis, dear,” I said with my best smile, “would you like to ride in the wagon for a while?”

  Her broad grin infuriated me. “Oh, Kate, my love. You look so comfortable there. I wouldn’t dream of displacing you.” With a laugh at my narrowed eyes, she galloped back to Enzo and Fadri.

  When I growled low in my throat, José somehow mistook it for gratitude, too in love with mules to know much about humans. “Don Luis, what a gentleman he be, always thinking of your comfort. Reminds me of mules, it does. Why, mules are the most dependable, bravest creatures on this God’s earth, they are. I remember my beloved Loca, oh, now there was a blessed mule, that one.”

  I closed my eyes and gripped the thick wooden seat. At least José’s constant patter occasionally interrupted the obsessive loop playing over and over inside my head, the one which worried the whole Anna question as a tongue worries a broken tooth.

  What would happen if Anna and Elena actually met? Elena’s tongue could be as razor sharp as her sword, but Anna’s marble haughtiness was hard to dent, sort of like bashing your head against a massive pedestal. She put herself up there, and she’d be damned if she’d let anyone knock her off.

  Except for a brief stop for cheese and ale, we pressed on. While I’d grown to appreciate the rugged strength of Castile’s square farmhouses with their brown thatched roofs, the broad plateaus flat as a table, the green pastures dotted with gnarled trees and blooming wildflowers, I missed the sheer lushness of Moorish Zaragoza, the gentle patter of fountains, the moisture that plumped up the eucalyptus trees and flushed the grapevines a deep green, the cool water that ran efficiently through the city. All that day in Castile we passed dry fields that could have produced ten times as much with Moorish irrigation systems.

  My mind reeled with José’s gossip, so I was extremely grateful when, toward dusk, Elena reined in Matamoros and raised her arm. Time to make camp for the night. Since it was a clear, dry evening, everyone left the tents bundled up and spread out bedrolls in the clearing, along the road, and into the woods.

  Soon small campfires glowed, groups of men talked quietly, some snored from scattered bedrolls, and the women washed pans and laughed.

  Finally Elena sat on a log across from me. We munched on the dried rabbit left over from last week and split a small loaf of bread.

  “You’re doing it again,” I said.

  “What?”

  “Undressing me with your eyes.”

  Her wicked grin was her only answer. When we’d finished, she picked up a chunk of charred wood, cool to the touch, and grabbed my hand. “It’s time,” she said.

  Ugh, not again. She led me to the edge of the clearing, found a tree with a wide trunk, and drew a black X with the blackened wood.

  “I’m never going to learn this,” I said, handing my dagger to Elena.

  She paced off twenty feet, held the dagger lightly by its tip, inhaled slowly, then the blade was suddenly gone, now embedded in the middle of the X. “Your turn,” Elena said as she retrieved my dagger.

  “Wait,” came a gruff call. Enzo and Fadri approached, faces serious. Enzo wrapped a saddle blanket around Elena’s waist, tying it on with a scabbard belt. Fadri jammed a leather helmet on Elena’s head and handed her a massive shield. They each gave Elena a solemn embrace, as if they may never see their beloved leader again, then headed back for their fire, Fadri tossing me a wink as he passed.

  “I’m rolling on the ground laughing, boys,” I said. “And I only hit Luis once, so it’s not like I do it every time.”

  The blade was cool between my fingers. I stared at the X and bit my lip. Maybe I should have brought a gun back into the past for protection and been done with it. I took a deep breath and let the blade fly.

  We both stared at the empty tree.

  “Where’d it go?” Elena asked.

  “Great mother of mules! We’re under attack!” José shot up from the nearby wagon bed, eyes as wild as his sleep-mussed hair.

  Enzo trotted over and calmed José down before he could start a camp-wide panic. He then pulled my dagger from the wagon’s sideboard and gave it back to Elena, saying, “Please, Luis. One day someone will get hurt.” Both his words and his parting scowl were meant for me, not Elena.

  Sighing, I accepted the dagger and jammed it back into its scabbard. “Enzo is right, you know. I should just give up.” I moved closer so I could whisper. “I have no skills.”

  “But you can drive high breed cars and order cap...cap...” I’d taught Elena a little English.

  “Hybrid cars and cappuccino.”

  She snorted the eleventh-century version of “whatever,” and pulled me close. “You, my love, are not entirely without skills,” she whispered into my neck.

  “What—you mean this?” One flick of my tongue against her earlobe and Elena’s knees buckled against mine. I loved doing that.

  “Jesus, woman, yes, I mean that.”

  Dusk had deepened into a black, moonless sky, lit only by the campfires flickering in the distance through the trees. For the rest of the evening we sat next to ours, talking quietly, holding hands, warm with happiness, as if we were the only two people in the world lucky enough to have found one another.

  The next day in the wagon, I had to listen to José’s never-ending theories about someone trying to kill him, but I didn’t have the heart to confess. I was also too busy obsessing about how I might have changed since Anna had seen me last, a bad idea that brought on an attack of the frumpies. Instead of Levi’s, Doc Martens, and Eddie Bauer, I now wore a dark muslin skirt that brushed the toes of my squared-off brown boots and totally covered my two dingy petticoats. I wore a thin undershirt and over it a loose, long-sleeved brown tunic cinched at the waist with a strip of leather Elena had tooled for me. I longed for the freedom to wear pants, but this was 1086, and I was a woman. One cross-dresser in the family was enough, especially since this culture tended to stone women who dressed as men.

  The closer we rode to Burgos, the more travelers we met about whom José knew some bit of gossip. Soon it was impossible to shut out all the dirt José so thoughtfully shared with me. Thankfully, just before dusk, and just as I began to consider pulling out my dagger and threatening José into silence, we topped a gentle rise and the plateau of Burgos spread out before us, the old Roman walls rising up from the greening fields around the city. The buildings of Burgos spilled out beyond the walls, all the way to an array of dirty white, tan, and yellow tents scattered at the city outskirts. White smoke from hundreds of cooking fires snaked up into the dense clouds hovering over Burgos.

  Elena urged Matamoros ahead and reached the army camp first, where the men gathered there swallowed her in a crush of welcome.

  Ten minutes later, José and I rumbled to a stop near the tent city, inhaling sweat and roasting meat and sun-baked leather and rustic latrines. Elena was still greeting comrades, clasping arms and dispensing bear hugs as men swarmed around her, hungry for a word of greeting, of encouragement. A handful of mercenaries who’d been with Luis in Zaragoza saw me, Luis’s wife, and hooted wildly, setting off an avalanche of leers, suggestive comments, and lewd tongue waggling. God, have men always been pigs?

  Elena pushed toward our wagon, her fierce blush only fueli
ng the men’s wild ribbing. Christ, what would they do if they ever learned the bulge at Luis Navarro’s crotch was nothing more than stitched leather filled with sugar?

  Elena grabbed the nearest wheel of our wagon, stood on a spoke, and pulled herself up to grasp the wooden seat on which I sat. “You and José ride into the city. The Crazy Mule Tavern should have lodging.” José squeaked with pleasure at the word ‘mule.’ “I will join you later.” She leaned closer so José could not hear. “I am sorry about the men. It has been a long winter...and you are beautiful. The men cannot help themselves.”

  The hooting crowd gathered around the wagon, and I hated to disappoint. “Neither can I,” I said. When I pulled her to me, giving her one of those wet, passionate kisses she loved, the men roared. Laughing, I pushed a wide-eyed Elena off the wheel into the outstretched arms of her men.

  “El Picador!” they chanted as they bore her away. A few pretended to swoon at my feet, so I laughed and waved them off. Elena’s men were rude, lewd, crude, and violent, but they adored her, or rather, they adored Luis.

  I didn’t like Burgos. After the neat cobbled streets of Moorish Zaragoza, this city’s packed dirt roads felt coarse and temporary. Even a light rain made life in the city a mud-sucking hell. The people, with their open faces and loud voices, were friendly enough, but too many memories floated about this city, thin ghosts waiting to swoop down and steal my breath at every familiar corner. Last fall Elena’s best friend Nuño and I had spent days here, searching madly for Elena, knowing no more at each day’s end than we had at its beginning. I’d finally forced an audience with King Alfonso, only to learn the twisted soldier Gudesto Gonzalez held my love. No wonder the dreary, smelly city tightened my throat and cramped my gut.

  That night, as the moon and stars hid behind fast-moving clouds, Elena and I snuggled together in a flea-ridden bed above the tavern and listened to rowdy songs drifting up through the rough floorboards. Now that I was so near the castle and possibly the mysterious Paloma de Palma, a heavy weight had settled on my heart.

  Elena slept nestled against my shoulder and I watched the clouds drift over the half moon hanging outside our window. What would I do if Paloma de Palma really was Anna? Would she take my rejection gracefully?

  What would Elena do? She wasn’t the most tolerant of women, which I chalked up both to the century in which we lived and her tendency toward violence. When a man from our village had grabbed my ass one day by the well, she’d nearly decapitated him, stopping only when I’d begged her.

  The lesbians I knew had always bent over backward to stay friends with their ex-lovers, sort of a “Why can’t we all just get along?” approach. Not me. Not Anna. Certainly not Elena. If Paloma de Palma really was Anna, things would get ugly in a big hurry.

  Chapter Four

  After a quick breakfast of thick porridge at the inn, Elena left to find Rodrigo, leaving me to deal with the painting on my own, as I’d hoped. I straightened our room, threw on my wool cape, then stomped down the rickety stairs and out into the narrow street, moving aside just before someone dumped a chamber pot out a second story window. And people in the twenty-first century thought they lived dangerously. I collared two filthy boys loitering outside the stables and hired them to help me break down the protective frame and carry the wrapped canvas to the castle. Unlike Zaragoza, Burgos provided no formal education for its children, so they ran wild in the streets. Zaragoza held school for both boys and girls.

  We left the stables with the two boys each gripping a side of the wrapped painting. “Hold it higher, out of the mud,” I scolded, but by the time we’d gone less than half way, my skirt, the boys, and the rags around the 6' x 8' painting were splattered with mud. I yearned for the paved streets of Zaragoza.

  I stopped the boys at the castle gates. The dark heavy walls towered above us, sturdy stone architecture able to protect the king and his court but lacking the grace and mystery of a Moorish palace. Some days I wished Elena’s boss, El Cid, would alienate the king again and be sent back into exile so we could return to Zaragoza.

  Shaking off the fantasy, I led the gawking boys inside and toward the main staircase. Last fall, when I’d been trying to rescue Elena from Gudesto’s clutches, I’d been all over this castle, so I knew right where to go.

  At the top of the stairs a palace guard moved to block our path. “Señora, you cannot pass.” I stopped, letting a haughty smile escape, one of those irritatingly superior smiles Anna sometimes used. The young guard’s swarthy face drained to the white of the stone behind him. “Oh! It is you...it is you.”

  I smiled at the poor man’s panic. “Marcos, isn’t it?” He hadn’t forgotten that I’d held a knife to his precious manhood six months earlier in my desperate attempt to speak to King Alfonso. “I bring a gift to the King, one he requested last year. Take me to him.”

  The guard stepped back a pace, eyes darting to my hands. “The king is in council with Rodrigo Díaz and the other mercenary commanders. He cannot be disturbed. But I can take the gift—”

  “No, I will take it to his throne room, where others will install it later.” Snapping my fingers at the boys, I pushed past the guard and down the hall. Alfonso’s empty throne room, lit only by two torches, danced with deep, heavy shadows. The far wall was still bare, waiting for my painting. Our footsteps echoed against the stone walls.

  “Lean it against that wall.” I paid the boys, sent them on their way, then carefully unwrapped the painting. Thank god the large canvas held its own in the throne room. I stepped back, critical of a few areas that could have used more work, but decided Alfonso wouldn’t notice or he wouldn’t care.

  In the painting, King Alfonso, looking taller and more handsome than in truth, stood before his army, red cape flowing in the wind. The vanquished Moorish commander, his saffron robes muddied and torn, knelt before Alfonso. Clasped in the Moor’s blood-stained hand was the key to his city, which he extended toward Alfonso in surrender.

  I studied the painting. It was good, very good. The colors were subdued, thanks to the primitive paint I’d made using egg, oil, and crushed and boiled minerals or plants for color. The deep red of crushed madder roots dominated the painting, with saffron highlights and charcoal-tinted sky as background. Lapis lazuli was too expensive, so I’d given up on blue.

  While the painting was mine, the idea wasn’t. I’d stolen shamelessly from Diego Velasquez’s Surrender at Breda, a seventeenth-century painting of a Dutch general handing over the keys to the city to a Spanish general, both with their men behind them and a burning city in the background.

  Of course, because I couldn’t use perspective, all the men were much the same size and looked like soldiers stacked on one another’s shoulders, sort of like vertical bowling pins. Perspective wouldn’t begin appearing in paintings until the fourteenth century, three hundred years in the future, which I had learned the hard way. Nine months ago, in 1085, while locked in a Moorish harem in Zaragoza, I’d innocently painted one of the emir’s wives using perspective and had nearly lost my head for it. The emir had accused me of stealing his wife’s soul because the painting had depth and roundness and looked more vivid than the woman herself.

  My gaze drifted to the edges of this painting. I had used another element from Velasquez’s work, one that had given me shivers when I’d seen it in Madrid’s Museo del Prado. Every soldier focused on the two leaders at the canvas’s center, except three men who stared out straight toward me, the viewer, as if to say, “Who are you and why are you watching us?” The men in my painting did the same, although their silent accusation was, “You don’t belong in this century.” I sighed. Some days I couldn’t shut out the voice in my head that said they were right.

  Even with the strong smell of paint from the canvas, the room reeked of wet, moldy walls. As I stood there, I felt, rather than heard, slow steady breathing from one shadowy corner, so I froze, then turned toward the corner. The hem of a woman’s dress brushed the tile floor, the rest of her in sha
dow.

  “I’m sorry,” I said. “I thought the room was empty.” She must be part of the court, or a servant taking a quiet break.

  The woman stood and approached me, the gold braid trim of her brown linen shimmering in the torchlight as she moved from the shadows. She wore her chestnut hair swept off her elegant neck and held by a delicate webbing of golden strands. With her slender hands clasped at her waist, she stopped beside me and stared at my artwork. “Do not concern yourself. I spend too much time alone these days as it is.” Her wistful smile, her warm brown eyes saddened by some inner pain, touched me so much I nearly reached for her hand. Instead I waited while she gazed at the painting. “You must be Señora Navarro.”

  I nodded, hiding my surprise.

  “What city has been conquered in this painting?”

  I shrugged. “Toledo, Cordoba, Valencia—whichever King Alfonso fancies.”

  She barely nodded, a wounded deer mesmerized by my painting. “Valencia, then. Toledo he has won and lost so many times the city has lost its luster. Cordoba is too close to Africa and the Almoravides. But Valencia...” Tiny sparks flared in her eyes. “Even I dream of Valencia.”

  She flicked a slender finger toward the painting. “He is not this handsome.”

  In my best conspiratorial voice, I confessed. “I thought I should appeal to his vanity.”

  Two small lines formed between the woman’s fine arched brows. “Very effective. Vanity is Alfonso’s greatest weakness.”