The Crusader by Michael Eisner

Author:Michael Eisner [Eisner, Michael Alexander]
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 978-1-4000-7584-3
Publisher: Knopf Doubleday Publishing Group
Published: 2001-12-15T05:00:00+00:00

DON FERNANDO ORGANIZED a midnight Mass in the castle to commemorate the triumph of our forces. Uncle Ramón refused to attend the ceremony. He told Don Fernando that the execution of unarmed Muslim prisoners tarnished the reputation of the entire Christian force and invited retaliation against Christian prisoners in Muslim jails. Under Uncle Ramón’s instructions, the Knights of Calatrava withdrew to our tent headquarters. We sat around a fire, drinking spirits to celebrate our victory. We drank to mark our survival and to dull the images of comrades dead and dying. I rubbed the dried blood from my hands, like copper crystals collecting in my palms. Still dressed in my armor, I fell asleep on the soft ground.

I woke in the dark, my body tensed, ready to fight, the tinny taste of blood on my tongue. A lantern burned in the corner of the tent. My comrades were asleep. They looked like corpses, gray, open-mouthed, still bloodied from combat. I stood tentatively, my neck stiff, my back aching. I could see Andrés just outside, sitting on the ground, rocking, his knees pulled to his chest. I left the tent and approached him.

Andrés was gazing toward the castle. I sat near him.

“Is that how you imagined it, Francisco?” he asked.

“Imagined what?” I asked.

“War,” he said.

“I never imagined anything, Andrés.”

I touched my neck, tender where the rope had burned my skin.

“Could we take a walk?” he asked.

We did not speak of a destination. We headed toward the castle, to the site of our witness. Drawn inexorably to a field of blood. We passed the entrance, nodding brusquely at Don Fernando’s knights, ignoring their hard glances.

It seemed like daytime in the courtyard, so bright was the fire from torches and their reflection on the yellow stones. We stood in the shadows of an archway, behind the pillars that led to the castle’s mosque.

Tiny, decrepit, Padre Albar spoke from a wood platform hastily erected in the middle of the castle courtyard. Behind the padre sat Don Fernando, the torchlight casting a fierce glow on his visage.

As Padre Albar recited passages from the Scriptures, the foot soldiers dragged the headless corpses and other body parts along the side of the castle, just past the mosque, to a bonfire outside the castle walls. The continuous procession splattered a bloody path through the mud. The padre motioned to the fire, preaching a solemn warning, a grave prognostication, a biblical incantation.

He will thoroughly purge His floor, and will gather the wheat into His garner; but the chaff He will burn with fire unquenchable.

The flames sparked and cackled with the fresh blood and exhaled a sweet, sickening smell of roasting hair and flesh that clung to our clothes and armor for several days. Andrés and I could not eat meat the following week, so pungent was the remembrance of that carnal aroma.

After his sermonizing, Padre Albar offered communion to the Christian knights, bowed, silent, drinking from the silver chalice the blood of Christ, dark and viscous. Our comrades, a tribe of cannibals, with Don Fernando its chief, his lips smeared red by the sacrifice.

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