flying, flipped in the air and came down behind Diego, giving him barely enough time to whirl and crouch down to avoid the weapon slashing toward him. Three or four passes later, Julius Caesar shifted the dagger to his left hand. Diego was ambidextrous himself, but he had never had to fight anyone who was, and for an instant he lost his focus. His opponent seized that moment to aim a kick at Diego’s chest that tumbled him to the ground, but Diego immediately sprang back up and using that momentum thrust his knife toward Caesar’s neck; had it been actual combat he would have sliced the older man’s throat, but Diego’s hand stopped short, as demanded, and he believed he had scored. As judges did not intervene, he assumed there had been no contact, but he had no opportunity to make sure because the man had locked him in a wrestling hold. Each defended himself from the other’s dagger while with legs and free arm he struggled to force his opponent to the ground. Diego managed to break free and again circled, readying himself for a new charge. He felt on fire; he was red in the face and streaming sweat, but his adversary was not even breathing hard and his face was as tranquil as it had been at the beginning of the match. Manuel Escalante’s words came to mind: never fight in anger. Diego drew two deep breaths, giving himself a moment to calm down, though watching Julius Caesar’s every move. As his mind cleared he realized that just as he had not expected an ambidextrous opponent, neither had his antagonist. He shifted the dagger to his other hand with the quickness he had learned for Galileo Tempesta’s magic tricks and attacked before the other man realized what had happened. Caught by surprise, Caesar stepped back, but Diego thrust a foot between his legs and pushed him off balance. As soon as he fell, Diego was on him, pressing with all his strength, his right arm across the man’s chest and his left fending off the struggling man’s dagger. For a long moment they rocked back and forth, muscles taut as steel, eyes burning into the opponent’s, teeth clenched. Diego not only had to hold his man down, he also had to drag him toward the center of the circle, a difficult task given that his opponent was scrapping with all his strength to prevent it. Out of the tail of his eye, Diego calculated the distance, which seemed enormous; never had an arm’s length seemed so long. There was only one way to do it. He rolled over. Now Caesar was on top of him, and he could not contain his grunt of triumph at having gained the advantage. But with superhuman strength Diego rolled once again, and that placed his adversary precisely on the symbol that marked the center of the circle.
Julius Caesars calm changed to something difficult to read, but it was enough to tell Diego that he had won. With one last effort he pinned his adversary’s shoulders to the ground.
“Well done,” said Julius Caesar with a smile, dropping his dagger.
After that, Diego had to take on two more members with his sword. The judges tied one hand behind his back to give the advantage to his opponents, as neither of those men knew as much about fencing as he.
Manuel Escalante’s training paid off royally, and he was able to vanquish his challengers in fewer than ten minutes. Intellectual challenges followed the physical ones. After demonstrating that he knew the history of La Justicia, he was given difficult problems for which he had to offer original solutions demanding wit, courage, and knowledge. Finally, when he had successfully overcome every obstacle, he was led to an altar. There he saw the symbols he must venerate: a loaf of bread, a scale, a sword, a chalice, and a rose. The bread symbolized the obligation to help the poor; the scale represented the determination to fight for justice; the sword represented courage; the chalice held the elixir of compassion; and the rose reminded the members of the secret society that life is not only sacrifice and labor, it is also beautiful, and for that reason alone must be defended. At the conclusion of the ceremony, Maestro Manuel Escalante, as Diego’s sponsor, placed the medallion around his neck.
“What will your code name be?” asked the Supreme Defender of the Temple.
“Zorro,” Diego replied without hesitation.
He had not been thinking about it, but in that instant he had a clear vision of the red eyes of the fox he had seen during another rite of initiation many years before in the forests of California.
“Welcome to La Justicia, Zorro,” said the Supreme Defender of the Temple, and all the members chorused his name.
Diego de la Vega was so euphoric that he had passed the tests, so awed by the solemnity of the sect’s members, and so overwhelmed by the complex steps of the ceremony and the high-flown names of the hierarchy Caballero of the Sun, Templar of the Nile, Maestro of the Cross, Guardian of the Serpent that he could not think clearly. He agreed with the dogma of the sect and felt honored that he had been admitted.
Only later, as he remembered the details and recounted them to Bernardo, would he judge the rite a little childish. He tried to make fun of himself for having taken it so seriously but his brother didn’t laugh. He simply pointed out how similar the principles of La Justicia were to those of the okahueoi his tribe.
One month after being accepted by the assembly of La Justicia, Diego surprised his maestro with an outlandish idea: he planned to free a group of hostages. Every attack launched by the guerrillas immediately unleashed a barbaric reprisal from the French. Soldiers would take four times as many hostages as they had lost and hang or shoot them in a public place. This swift response did not dissuade the Spanish it merely fueled their hatred, but it broke the hearts of the unfortunate families trapped in the middle.
“This time they’ve taken five women, two men, and an eight-year-old boy, maestro, who will pay for the death of two French soldiers. They already killed the parish priest in the doorway of his church. They are holding these prisoners in the fort and are going to shoot them Sunday, at twelve o’clock noon,” Diego explained.
“I know that, Don Diego, I have seen the notices all around the city.”
Escalante replied.
“We have to save them, maestro.”
“To attempt that would be madness. La Ciudadela is impregnable. And in the hypothetical case that you succeeded in your mission, the French would execute two or three times that many hostages, I assure you.”
“What does La Justicia do in such a situation, maestro?”
“There are times that one must resign oneself to the inevitable. Many innocents die in a war.”
“I will remember that.”
Diego was not inclined to resign himself; among other reasons, Amalia was one of those who had been taken, and he could not desert her.
Through one of those blunders of fate that her cards had forgotten to warn her about, the Gypsy happened to be in the street at the time of the roundup by the French and was captured along with other persons as innocent as she. When Bernardo brought him the bad news, Diego gave no thought to the obstacles he would face, only the necessity of intervening and the irresistible thrill of adventure.
“In view of the fact that it is impossible to get inside La Ciudadela, Bernardo, I will have to settle for the palace of Le Chevalier Duchamp. I want to have a private conversation with him. How does that seem? Ah, I see that you don’t like that idea, but I can’t think of another. I know what you are thinking: that this is some kind of schoolboy prank, like that time with the bear when we were boys. No, this is serious there are human lives to consider. We can’t allow them to shoot Amalia. She is our friend. Well, in my case, she’s something more than a friend, but that isn’t the point. Unfortunately, brother mine, I cannot count on La Justicia, so I am going to need your help. It will be dangerous, but not as much as it would appear. Here is my plan…”
Bernardo threw his hands up in a gesture of surrender and prepared to back his brother, as he had since they were born. Occasionally, when he was especially tired and lonely, he was convinced that it was time to return to California and face the undeniable truth that their childhood was behind them; Diego did show regrettable signs of being an eternal adolescent. Bernardo wondered how they could be so different and yet love each other so much. While for him destiny was a heavy weight on his shoulders, his brother was as carefree as a lark. Amalia, who knew how to read the enigmas of the stars, had explained why they had such different personalities. She said that they were born under two different signs of the Zodiac, although in the same place and during the same week. Diego was a Gemini, and he was a Taurus, and that was what determined their temperaments. Bernardo listened to Diego’s plan with his usual patience, without showing the doubts that troubled him, because deep down he had faith in his brother’s inconceivable good luck. He knew that Diego arrived at his own conclusions, and then did something about them.
Bernardo carried out his assignment, which was to strike up a friendship with a French soldier and get him to drink until he passed out. He then removed the man’s uniform and donned it himself: a dark blue jacket with a crimson military collar, white breeches and shirt, black leggings and tall headgear. In that uniform he was able to lead a team of horses into the palace gardens without attracting the attention of the night guards. Security around the sumptuous residence of Le Chevalier was somewhat lax because it had never occurred to anyone to attack it. At night, guards were posted with lanterns, but with the tedious passing of the hours their vigilance relaxed. Diego, dressed in his black acrobat costume, with cape and mask, the attire that he called his Zorro disguise, used the dark shadows to approach the building. With a spark of inspiration, he had pasted on a mustache he found in the
