The slave girl was waiting, hands tied round a beam, her feet just touching the ground.
“I don’t want my son to see this,” Bernat told Jaume.
“This isn’t the moment, Bernat,” Jaume warned him. “Don’t go looking for trouble ...”
Bernat shook his head again.
“You’ve worked hard, Bernat; don’t cause trouble for your boy.”
In strict mourning clothes, Grau joined the circle of slaves, apprentices, and craftsmen surrounding Habiba.
“Take off her clothes,” he ordered Jaume.
When she saw Jaume tearing off her tunic, Habiba tried to raise her legs to cover herself. But her dark, naked body, gleaming with sweat, was soon exposed to the onlookers’ expectant gaze ... and to the whip that Grau had already laid out on the floor. Bernat grasped Arnau’s shoulders tight. The young boy began to cry.
Grau drew his arm back and cracked the whip against her naked upper half: the leather snaked across her back and the metal thongs wrapped themselves round her, digging into her breasts. A thin trickle of blood started to run down her dark skin. Her breasts were open wounds. Habiba lifted her face to the sky and howled as the pain racked her body. Arnau started to tremble uncontrollably, begging Grau to stop.
But he merely drew back his arm again.
“It was your job to look after my children!”
The whip resounded once more, forcing Bernat to turn his son round and press his face against him. The slave girl howled a second time, while Arnau’s shrieks of protest were stifled in his father’s body. Grau went on flogging the Moorish girl until not only her back and shoulders but her breasts, buttocks, and legs were one bleeding mass.
“TELL YOUR MASTER I am leaving.”
Jaume’s mouth drew into a narrow line. For a second, he was tempted to embrace Bernat, but he could see some of the apprentices staring at them.
Bernat watched the official walk toward the big house. He had tried to talk to his sister, but Guiamona had not responded. For several days, Arnau had not moved from the straw pallet he now shared with his father. He sat there without moving, and when his father came up to see him, he always found him staring at the spot where they had tried to cure Habiba’s wounds.
They had cut her down as soon as Grau left the workshop, but did not know where they could safely get hold of her body. Estranya ran in with oil and ointments, but as soon as she saw the bloody mass of flesh, she simply shook her head sadly. Arnau watched all this quietly from the back of the room, tears in his eyes; when Bernat tried to push him outside, he refused to go. Habiba died that same night. The only sign that she had breathed her last was when the low wail, like that of a newborn baby, that she had been making all day suddenly stopped.
Grau heard of his brother-in-law’s decision from Jaume. It was the last thing he needed: the two Estanyols, both of them with the birthmark by their right eye, roaming the streets of Barcelona in search of work, talking about him with everyone who cared to listen ... and a lot of people would be interested, now that he had reached the summit. He felt his stomach churn, and his mouth was dry: Grau Puig, a Barcelona alderman, master of the guild of potters, member of the Council of a Hundred, giving shelter to runaway serfs. The nobles were already against him. The more Barcelona helped King Alfonso, the less the king depended on the feudal lords, and the fewer the rewards they could hope to wring from the monarch. Who had been the chief promoter of this support for the king? He had. And whose interests were harmed when serfs deserted the countryside? The landowning nobility. Grau shook his head and sighed. He cursed the day he had allowed this peasant to stay under his roof!
“Bring him here,” he told Jaume.
When his brother-in-law appeared, Grau said: “Jaume tells me that you want to leave us.”
Bernat nodded.
“What do you intend to do?”
“I’ll look for work to support my son.”
“You have no trade. Barcelona is full of people like you: peasants who could not earn a living from their lands. They never find work, and end up dying of hunger. Besides,” Grau added, “you aren’t even on the citizens’ roll, even though you have lived long enough in the city now.”
“What do you mean by the citizens’ roll?” asked Bernat.
“It’s the document that proves you have lived a year and a day in Barcelona. It means you are a free citizen, not someone’s vassal.”
“Where can I get mine?”
“The city aldermen authorize them.”
“I’ll ask for one.”
Grau looked hard at Bernat. He was dirty, dressed in a shabby tunic and wearing a pair of rope sandals. In his mind’s eye, Grau saw him in front of the city aldermen after having already told his story to dozens of clerks: Grau Puig’s brother-in-law and nephew, hidden in his workshop for years. The news would spread like wildfire. He himself had used similar gossip against his enemies in the past.
“Sit down,” he said. “When Jaume told me what you planned to do, I talked to your sister, Guiamona,” he lied to conceal his change of attitude, “and she begged me to take pity on you.”
“I don’t need pity,” Bernat objected, thinking of Arnau sitting on the pallet, staring into space. “I’ve been working hard for years in return for—”
“That was the offer,” Grau stopped him. “You accepted it. At that moment it suited you.”
“That may well be,” Bernat admitted. “But I did not sell myself as a slave, and it doesn’t interest me now.”
