'I don't have the faintest idea what… Three years, Brother.'
The friar winced as if that news was disastrous. 'So you were what, sixteen? Seventeen?'
'Eighteen.' They were talking about the hob, although Toby had no idea how that had come into the conversation. It was the last thing he ever discussed.
Brother Bernat shook his head in dismay. 'You have done very well to last as long as you have, then. Don't wait much longer, Tobias, please!'
He was crazier than the don, that was all.
'Wait for what? What do you mean about doing well to last?'
The clear dark eyes told him his denials did not convince.
'You are going to go insane very shortly. I think you know that, and know what will follow. It is amazing that you have lasted so long. I am surprised it did not happen today in the turmoil of the fight. You must have nerves like granite, my son.'
Toby made half a move to rise and then hesitated. 'I don't know what you mean, Brother.'
'Fear, Tobias. Or rage. Hatred.' The dark eyes widened. 'Any sort of strong passion. You must avoid them. Great remorse, also.'
Mezquiriz? He could
Toby jumped up and strode away, and if that was not rage he was feeling, it was fear.
CHAPTER THREE
The room was dim, with walls and floor of dark stone and a heavy-beamed ceiling high enough to be lost in shadow. Its stifling heat came from a fireplace at one end, which provided almost as much light as the two small, high-set windows at the other. Three men garbed in the simple brown hose and doublets of common workers waited patiently at the cool end. They were all burly and muscular, but nothing else could be known about them, for their heads were concealed in black bags. Once in a while one of them would move so that a glitter of eyes showed behind the eye holes.
A table along one side bore two tall candlesticks and a green crucifix inlaid with colored jewels, too large to be anything but colored glass. Behind the table sat three elderly men in the white supplicars and black robes of Dominicans, the Black Friars, all with their hoods back to display their tonsures, all sweating profusely. The one on the left fumbled endlessly through a pile of papers and parchments. The one on the right kept scribbling in a large book, recording the proceedings with a quill pen that he dipped from time to time in a silver inkwell. Two shaven- head novices stood at the door opposite.
In the exact center of the room hung a rope.
On one side of it stood a soldier holding a musket erect beside him, and he must be the most uncomfortable person present, because he wore a thickly-padded blue doublet, black breeches, and a polished wide-brimmed helmet, and was burdened with sword, ramrod, slow match, powder horn, shot bag, and the other paraphernalia of the professional military. He looked utterly miserable, as if this was one of the worst days of his life, and perhaps more than the heat was responsible for that.
On the other side of the rope stood Toby, stinking of his jail cell. He was trying to hold up his head with a show of courage he did not feel while he glared stubbornly at the friar in the center, the one in charge, the inquisitor.
His name was Father Vespianaso. He was a frail-seeming, elderly man, with a thin white tonsure, thick black eyebrows, and a close-trimmed, piebald beard. His eyes were red-rimmed and droopy, full of such sadness that they must have viewed all the sorrows of the world. A sagging blister of flesh under each of them was the only padding on his face, which otherwise was only a skull wrapped in skin so dry that it seemed ready to crack and flake away completely.
He looked up from the document he had been reading for the last ten minutes.
'Is the accused now ready to disavow his demon and reveal its name so that it may be cast out?'
Toby understood most of the proceedings and knew that particular question by heart, but the Inquisition had its rules, and the presence of an interpreter during the examination of foreigners was one of them. He waited until the soldier translated.
'The inquisitor asks if the accused is now ready to disavow his demon and reveal its name so that it may be cast out.' His English was not much easier to understand than the original Castilian. His vivid blue eyes stared fixedly ahead, as if trying to see through the prisoner's chest.
'Tell him I do not have a demon.'
The friar had heard that familiar protest many times during the last four days. 'Tobias, Tobias!' He shook his head sadly. 'If the accused will not confess, he must be put to the Question.'
Toby understood that only too well. Examination of a suspect went through clearly defined stages. They had begun three days ago in a cheerful, airy room upstairs. The questioning had grown steadily harsher and more menacing until, at the end of yesterday's session, they had brought him down to this cellar and shown him the whips and branding irons, the pulleys in the ceiling, the funnels for water torture, and the ladder-like grid to which the victim would be tied during their use. Today they had brought him straight to this chamber, where the fire was already lit and the three tormentors waited. That had been at least two hours ago. So far the tormentors had done nothing more than stoke the fire.
What was the question this time? Didn't matter.
'I do not have a demon. If I did, how could I possibly cast it out? Does he think I would voluntarily harbor a demon? Does he think such a demon would tell me its name? I do not have a demon!'
No demon, no name. Of course the hob would count as a demon in the inquisitors' eyes — at times Toby himself found the distinction fuzzy.
There was no way out of this trap. They had explained it to him many times, being patient, aggressive, understanding, and menacing by turns. A demon could only be controlled by its name, so the accused must reveal it. If he refused, he must be forced to comply. If he still would not talk or did not know the demon's name, then the demon must be driven out of him by making it suffer. That, unfortunately, meant making the accused suffer, but suffering was better than possession, wasn't it? Supposedly an incarnate would keep its husk alive, or at least operational, indefinitely. The only way a man could prove that he was not possessed was to die.
Another question.
Same answer: 'I do not have a demon!' He must keep to the same answer. How much did they know? How sure were they? Demons could detect the hob in him, so was the inquisitor himself possessed? A demon looking for employment would find nothing more congenial to its tastes than being an officer of the Inquisition. But it didn't matter whether they were guessing or certain or had just chosen him at random. Once they started asking questions, they could never admit they had picked on the wrong man. There was no escape.
The inquisitor held out a paper.
Carrying his musket, the soldier marched three paces to the table to take it, then brought it back and held it up in front of the prisoner. 'The inquisitor asks if the accused recognizes this notice.'
The accused did, and his sweat turned cold in the heat. The paper was a smudged and tattered poster dated October 1519. The woodcut it bore was a crude drawing of himself as a youth, but a good likeness considering that it had been done from memory. The inscription in both Scots and Gaelic outlined the Parliamentary act of attainder that declared him to be possessed by a demon. It also proclaimed a reward of five thousand marks for anyone who brought in his corpse with a blade through the heart.
How had they gotten ahold of that? They had not produced that poster before, or even mentioned it. He found his voice, although it sounded strange to him.
'It lies.'
The inquisitor did not wait for the translation. 'But the accused does recognize it?'
The soldier translated the question and Toby's reply: 'I have never seen it before. I was told about it. It lies. Whoever wrote it was lying.'
Other people had been lying also, members of the pilgrim band, but he had not been told which. They had
