Free The Devils of Cardona by Matthew Carr

an effort even to get back on his mule. By the fourth day, he had begun to get used to being in the saddle, but the roads were poor and sometimes almost nonexistent. In some places they had to lead their animals knee- and even waist-deep through water, because the road had been washed away and a bridge had collapsed. On some days they traveled for hours along dusty roads through an interminable, almost treeless plain, where only the occasional farm, castle or shepherd’s stone hut provided anything to relieve the emptiness. And then they would come across a beautiful town like Aranda, with its fine churches and squares, its shops and markets and its ancient stone bridge spanning the green banks and rows of poplars that lined the Duero.
    On some nights they camped out on the great plain in the open air, and he preferred this to the grubby inns run by fat men who looked as if they had gone to sleep in their unwashed aprons and by wide-hipped women with sullen faces and unwashed and unbrushed hair, where they slept two to a bed on dirt-encrusted sheets red with blood from mosquito bites or sometimes on the floor, in low rooms that reeked of wine, brandy and bacon. Even though they ate the meat that they brought themselves, the inns were insalubrious and evil-smelling, with walls black from smoke and plates and cups that were as greasy as the tables.
    He preferred to camp outside, despite the cold, and eat the raisins, fruits and fresh bread that they bought from markets or peasant roadsidevendors. One evening Ventura used his crossbow to shoot a rabbit, which they cooked at the campfire. On another afternoon Mendoza bought a lamb from a peasant and Ventura slaughtered it on the spot before slinging it over his saddle. Most days they rode from early morning until late in the afternoon, because Don Bernardo was determined to reach Aragon as quickly as possible.
    Despite the physical discomfort and the primitive conditions, Gabriel felt happy. In Valladolid he had risen early and gone to bed early. Apart from Don Bernardo and Magdalena, his companions were classmates, tutors, teachers and priests, and the boundaries of his world had consisted of the Pisuerga and Esgueva Rivers and the poorer suburbs that Magda always told him to keep away from.
    Now there were no classmates to call him “Moor,” “bum boy” and “slave,” and he thought of the envy that his tormentors would feel if they could see him riding in the company of policemen and soldiers on a mission in the service of His Majesty the king to the land of James the Conqueror and Ferdinand the Catholic. Every day he saw a world that most of them had never seen, and the more he saw of his native land, the more impossible it seemed to him that there could be a greater country than Spain, or that the Turk or any ruler in Christendom could ever hope to conquer it.
    He took an almost proprietary pride in its walled cities and strong castles, in the monasteries and convents perched on mountainsides and cliff edges. Despite Mendoza’s urgency, Gabriel’s guardian invariably found time to stop at churches and cathedrals or a fine palace or public building and admire the paintings, the wood and stone carvings and gilded altar panels or retablos, or point out some example of fine workmanship in the construction of a pillar or an arch or pictorial skill in the features of Jesus and Mary or the face of an apostle from a Gothic bas-relief, or examine a few rocks that he said might have belonged to the ruins of Numancia, where the Celts of Iberia had once committed suicide rather than surrender to Scipio’s legions.
    He cast a more critical eye at the sight of fields that should have been under cultivation and had instead been left barren for no good reason, at streams and creeks that should have been dammed up or directed into canals, at bridges that had not been maintained. Such things were bad for Spain, he said, because a hungry population was an