Now it was Joan’s turn to silence him with a look.
“KING ALFONSO’S SOLDIERS have put an end to the revolt,” was Joan’s only comment when he came back that evening.
But Bernat did not return that night either.
The next morning, Joan said good-bye to Arnau once more.
“You ought to get out,” he said.
“What if Bernat comes home?” said Arnau, his voice choking with emotion.
The two brothers hugged each other. “Where are you, Father?” they both thought.
It was Pere who went out in search of news. It was easier to find out what had happened than it was to make his way back home.
“I’m sorry, my lad,” he told Arnau. “Your father has been arrested.”
“Where is he?”
“In the magistrate’s palace, but—”
Before he could finish, Arnau had run out the door. Pere looked at his wife and shook his head. The old woman buried her face in her hands.
“They held emergency trials,” Pere explained. “Lots of witnesses recognized Bernat because of his birthmark, and swore he was one of the leaders of the uprising. Why did he do it? He seemed—”
“Because he has two children to feed,” his wife interrupted him, tears in her eyes.
“Because he had... ,” Pere said wearily. “He has already been hanged along with nine others in Plaza del Blat.”
Mariona raised her hands to her face again, but then suddenly dropped them.
“Arnau...,” she exclaimed, heading for the door. Her husband’s words brought her to a halt:
“Let him go. From today he’s no longer a boy.”
Mariona nodded. Pere went over and held her in his arms.
By order of the king, the executions had been carried out immediately. There was not even time to build a scaffold, and so the prisoners were hanged from carts.
Arnau stopped running as soon as he got to Plaza del Blat. He was panting, out of breath. The square was full of silent people standing with their backs to him, staring at... Above their heads, next to the palace, hung ten lifeless bodies.
“No! ... Father!”
His anguished cry echoed round the square. Hundreds of heads turned toward him. Arnau walked slowly through the crowd, which pulled back to let him through. He searched the ten dead faces...
“AT LEAST LET me go and tell the priest,” Pere’s wife pleaded.
“I’ve already told him. He must be there by now.”
When he identified his father, Arnau vomited. The people around him jumped back. The boy took another look at the swollen purplish black face, tilted to one side, with its contorted features and eyes that were fighting now for all eternity to burst from their sockets. His father’s tongue lolled lifelessly from the corner of his mouth. The second and third times he looked, all Arnau brought up was bile.
He felt a hand on his shoulder.
“We should go, my boy,” said Father Albert.
The priest tried to pull him in the direction of Santa Maria, but Arnau would not move. He looked over again at his father, and shut his eyes. He would never be hungry again. Arnau trembled like a leaf. Father Albert tried again to pull him away from the macabre scene.
“Leave me, Father, please.”
With the priest and the others in the square looking on, Arnau ran unsteadily over to the improvised gallows. He was clutching his stomach and was still shaking all over. When he reached his father, he turned toward one of the soldiers standing guard beside the bodies.
“Can I take him down?” he asked.
Faced with the boy’s insistent gaze from below his father’s body, the soldier hesitated. What would his own children have done if he had been hanged?
“No,” he had to tell him. If only he could have been somewhere else! He would have preferred to be fighting a band of Moors, or to be with his children ... What kind of death was this? The hanged man had simply been fighting for his children, for this boy begging him with his eyes, like everyone else in the square. Where was the city magistrate? “The magistrate has ordered that they be left hanging in the square for three days.”
“I’ll wait.”
“After that they are to be placed above the city gates, like everyone executed in Barcelona, so that anyone passing by will heed the laws.”
With that, the soldier turned his back on Arnau and continued his patrol round the hanged bodies.
“Hunger,” he heard behind him. “He was only hungry.”
When his futile patrol brought him back alongside Bernat’s body, the boy was sitting on the ground beneath him, head in hands, crying. The soldier hardly dared look at him.
