Free The Devils of Cardona by Matthew Carr Page A

unhappy population, and unhappiness bred lawlessness, crime and rebellion.
    Gabriel knew that these observations were part of his education, but he was always more interested in the people they encountered than he was in his guardian’s meditations on architecture, agriculture or road maintenance. Along the roads they encountered a wide variety of people from all trades and classes, from muleteers and merchants carrying carts piled with merchandise to priests, monks, nuns and soldiers; from sellers of real or faked indulgences to French and Italian craftsmen; from laborers and stonemasons heading for Valladolid and Madrid in search of work to nobles in gleaming black coaches with leather interiors and silk curtains to protect their passengers from the dust. Some traveled alone on foot or horseback; others had formed groups for protection as they moved along roads where the only visible signs of law and order were the constables from the Holy Brotherhood who intermittently patrolled the highways of Castile.
    Many members of the Santa Hermandad looked like bandits and highwaymen themselves. They were grim, hard-faced men who wore leather chest armor and bristled with weapons. On Mendoza’s party’s fifth day out, they saw a small crowd standing by the roadside just outside a village. As they drew closer, they saw three members of the Hermandad holding a young man to the ground while another stood waiting with an ax. The young man was almost naked, and he was writhing desperately in an attempt to escape. Necker paused to ask what was happening, and it was not until they had ridden past that he told Gabriel that the Holy Brothers were about to cut off the young man’s right hand because he had been caught thieving in a market.
    They also encountered peasants sitting outside mud houses, in roughyarn shirts and hide jackets, some of whom were barefoot or wearing tattered rope-soled sandals, and shepherds with their flocks whose dirty, unwashed faces and primitive appearance shocked him. Everywhere there were paupers and vagabonds moving from one place to another, who Mendoza said would have been arrested had he encountered them in Valladolid. Some were army veterans, missing arms and legs, who clustered around them brandishing their stumps or pointing at their mutilated faces, crying out “Lepanto! Lepanto!” and the names of other wars and battles.
    Mendoza said that these experiences were sometimes invented, and Lepanto was a particular favorite of beggars because of the religious obligation it entailed. To have fought at Lepanto was to have fought in a war blessed by the pope and all the great princes of Christendom, and it was incumbent on all good Christians to treat its veterans with charity, reverence and gratitude. Ventura sometimes caught them out by inventing the names of ships and asking if they had fought on them, and Mendoza threatened to arrest those who said they had.
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    T HE PLEASURE OF THE JOURNEY was greatly enhanced by Gabriel’s traveling companions. They spoke of cities he had only read or heard about, such as Antwerp, Paris, Rome, Tunis and Naples, with the easy familiarity with which the people of Valladolid spoke about their neighborhoods or surrounding villages. Even Daniel and Martín had been to Lisbon and the Azores, despite the fact that they were only a few years older than Gabriel. In the evenings they passed stories back and forth across the campfire or the tavern table, of wars and battles in the Alpujarras and the marshes of Flanders, of wounds and narrow escapes, of bandits and criminals arrested or killed.
    They were men of action who seemed afraid of nothing. They drank wine and brandy and cursed—particularly Ventura, who uttered a constant stream of profanities despite Necker’s obvious disapproval. Mendoza tooklittle part in these exchanges. Most evenings he rarely talked at all but sat reading his book or drawing