The Horseman's Song Read online

  Ben Pastor, born in Italy, became a US citizen after moving to Texas. She lived for thirty years in the United States, working as a university professor in Illinois, Ohio and Vermont, and currently spends part of the year in her native country. The Horseman’s Song is the sixth in the Martin Bora series and follows on from the success of Road to Ithaca, Tin Sky, A Dark Song of Blood, Lumen and Liar Moon, also published by Bitter Lemon Press. Ben Pastor is the author of other novels including the highly acclaimed The Water Thief and The Fire Waker, and is considered one of the most talented writers in the field of historical fiction. In 2008 she won the prestigious Premio Zaragoza for best historical fiction.

  Also available from Bitter Lemon Press

  by Ben Pastor:

  Tin Sky

  Lumen

  Liar Moon

  A Dark Song of Blood

  The Road to Ithaca

  THE

  HORSEMAN’S

  SONG

  Ben Pastor

  BITTER LEMON PRESS

  LONDON

  BITTER LEMON PRESS

  First published in the United Kingdom in 2019 by

  Bitter Lemon Press, 47 Wilmington Square, London WC1X 0ET

  www.bitterlemonpress.com

  Copyright © 2004 by Ben Pastor

  This edition published in agreement with the Author through Piergiorgio Nicolazzini Literary Agency (PNLA)

  All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced in any form or by any means without written permission of the publisher.

  The moral rights of Ben Pastor have been asserted in accordance with the Copyright, Designs, and Patents Act 1988

  A CIP record for this book is available from the British Library

  ISBN 978–1–912242–1-5

  EBook ISBN 978–1–912242–12-2

  Typeset by Tetragon, London

  Printed and bound in Great Britain by TK

  To all those who struggle for bread, land and liberty.

  In the black moonlight

  Of the highwaymen,

  Tinkle the spurs.

  Little black horse,

  Where are you taking

  Your dead horseman?

  FEDERICO GARCÍA LORCA, “CANCIÓN DE JÍNETE”

  CONTENTS

  MAIN CHARACTERS

  HISTORICAL TERMS

  CHAPTER 1

  CHAPTER 2

  CHAPTER 3

  CHAPTER 4

  CHAPTER 5

  CHAPTER 6

  CHAPTER 7

  CHAPTER 8

  POSTSCRIPT

  AUTHOR’S FINAL NOTE AND ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS

  MAIN CHARACTERS

  NATIONALISTS

  Martin Bora, German volunteer, Tercio of the Spanish Foreign Legion

  Indalecio Fuentes, Former policeman, Guardia Civil

  Jacinto Costa y Serrano, Colonel, Spanish army

  Josep Aixala, Volunteer from Catalonia

  Niceto, Stage actor

  Tomé, Guitar player

  Paradís, Former sailor

  Alfonso, University student

  Mendez Roig, Captain, Francisco Franco’s secret service (SIFNE)

  Cziffra, Officer, Abwehr

  INTERNATIONALISTS

  Philip (“Felipe”) Walton, American volunteer

  Henri (“Mosko”) Brissot, Physician and French volunteer

  Marypaz, Walton’s girlfriend

  Chernik, American journalist

  Iñaki Maetzu, Former convict from the Basque region

  Valentin, Gypsy

  Bernat, Volunteer from Catalonia

  Rafael, Teenage volunteer

  Almagro, Dispatch rider

  Marroquí, Dispatch rider

  SPANISH CIVILIANS

  Federico García Lorca, Poet

  Remedios, Bruja (witch)

  Luisa Cadena, Lorca’s cousin

  Antonio Cadena, Luisa’s husband

  Francisco (“Paco”) Soler, Stage designer

  Vargas, Music teacher

  Don Millares, Pharmacist

  Consuelo Costa y Serrano, Colonel Serrano’s wife

  Soleá Yarza, Midwife and meddler

  HISTORICAL TERMS

  Abwehr German secret service.

  Carlists Monarchist troops, named after their support for Don Carlos, brother of King Ferdinand VII, against the French in 1934.

  CNT National Confederation of Labour, an anarchosyndicalist organization, and the largest Spanish labour union at the beginning of the Civil War.

  FAI Spanish Anarchist Federation, an extreme Left political entity which, however, resisted growing Soviet intervention in Spain.

  Falange Fascist-inspired extreme nationalist movement, founded by José Antonio Primo de Rivera in 1933.

  Guardia Civil Militarized police force in Spain.

  NKVD People’s Commissariat for International Affairs; the Soviet secret police and espionage agency.

  POUM Worker’s Party of Marxist Unification. Formed by former exiled Spanish Marxists, it supported Trotsky’s concept of “permanent revolution” and opposed Stalin.

  PSUC United Socialist Party of Catalonia. Dominated by Communist elements and opposed to Anarchists.

  SIFNE Technically, the Spanish Information Service for the North-East; in fact, the main information-gathering service for the Nationalists.

  Tercio Name commonly given to the Spanish Foreign Legion, based in Morocco. It supported Franco’s rebellion against the Republican government of Spain.

  1

  CAÑADA DE LOS ZAGALES, TERUEL PROVINCE, ARAGON REGION, NORTH-WESTERN SPAIN, 13 JULY 1937

  The tall canes gave a rustle like rain, but it hadn’t rained in a month, and down the bank the brook ran low.

  From where he stood, Martin Bora knew death at once. Lately the inertia of death had grown familiar to him, and he recognized it in what he saw at the curve of the mule track, where trees clustered and a bundle of leafy canes swished like rain. He couldn’t make out the shape from the bank of the brook, where he’d bathed and was now putting his uniform back on. In a time of civil war, these days did not call for inquisitiveness. Yet Bora was curious about life and the point when life ceases. Staring at the slumped dark mass, he finally managed to struggle into his wet clothes, quickly lacing and buttoning his uniform. The stiff riding boots and gun belt were next.

  Overhead, the air was scented and moist. The summer sky would soon turn white like paper, but at this hour, it had the tender tinge of bruised flesh. Bora started up the incline, steadying his boots on the shifting pebbles, and reached the mule track to take a better look. He could see now that it was a human body. As he took out his gun, his arm and torso adjusted to the heft of steel, hardening immediately, almost aggressively. Shoulders hunched, he crossed the track, straining for sounds around him, but a lull had fallen over trees, brook and leafy canes. The sierra, its crude face of granite rising above, was silence itself.

  The body lay twisted on the edge of the track, face down. Bora drew near, lowering his gun. I shouldn’t be turning my back to the trees, but look, look … A small hole gaped black and round at the base of the man’s head; the dark fleece of the neck appeared sticky, matted. I should not feel safe. Anyone could shoot me right now. Yet the tension slackened in him. Bora’s armed hand sank to his side. Not much blood on the ground, although the man’s white shirt was deeply stained – a dark triangle between his shoulders. No, no. No danger. Bora looked down. There’s no danger. He stood at the rim of the bloody puddle, a crisp lacy edge that gravelly dirt had absorbed and sunlight would dry soon. It marked a boundary at his feet, curving sharply where a twig had stopped it from flowing. No danger. Bora glanced up. A young ash tree stood smooth and tall, alone on the curve. How telling that a twig sh
ould be born from it and grow and fall to the ground to stop a man’s lifeblood; that a man should live unaware that a bit of ash wood awaits him on a lonely road. Bora holstered the gun, wondering what kind of wood, which road, what sky, what morning waited for his dead body and would grow into the fullness of day without him.

  He could smell blood as he crouched down, virtually tasting it when he turned the body to check if the bullet had destroyed the face. But it was intact. Handsome in a southern or gypsy way, with a broad forehead and eyebrows joined at the bridge of the nose, the man’s face appeared serene, the eyelids lowered and the mouth slightly open. The lashes were like a woman’s, dark and long. The body felt cold to the touch, sweaty with dew. Like mashed lilies, Bora thought, an unfamiliar image to him. This dead man has the crushed pallor of white flowers that have been torn up and stepped on.

  Never in the past weeks of war had he looked at the dead, those of the Reds or of his companions, without pity of flesh for flesh, blood for blood. Yet he could kill without forsaking this pity. He handled the body with slow care, and when his fingers became smeared with blood, he wiped them on his own clothes.

  The dead man’s hands were narrow, square-fingered. No calluses, no wedding ring. Bora looked for a weapon, and found none. A brief examination of the clothes followed – small gestures, quick judgements. The man’s shoes were missing, but the socks were good socks, white and unspotted. Bora touched something in the pocket that felt like a small photograph.

  He stopped, holding his breath. Suddenly, he could hear the canes’ whisper and watery sound again. Down the bank, eddies around the pebbles gave voice to the invisible brook. Even as he knelt there, he realized the absolute centrality of his position. Somehow this was a hub, a point from which radiated an intensifying sense of reality. He perceived in his mind’s eye, as if from a high vantage point, the curve on the mule track, the brook in the dry land, the dizzying reaches of the sierra, Aragon and Spain around it, the sense of holding firm and yet being lost, in the presence of this death. Everything revolved around this, and he did not know why. The small photograph in the dead man’s pocket felt smooth, hard-edged. Bora ran his fingers along its scalloped contours and the touch reconnected him to the here and now, a quick sinking back into reality. Tuesday, 13 July 1937. The password for the day is “España una, y grande.” What will Sergeant Fuentes say? My uniform is drenched and smells of silt. Time to go. Behind him, the canes caught the last of the pre-dawn breeze, and soon his men and the Reds would be up. Bora pulled the photograph out, glanced at it, and slipped it into his own pocket.

  SIERRA DE SAN MARTÍN, LOYALIST “REPUBLICAN” CAMP AT EL PALO DE LA VIRGEN

  Twenty minutes up the mountainside, Major Philip Walton hadn’t slept well. He’d slept very little, in fact, and had had the same recurring dream. That’s all it was, not even a nightmare. A yellow wall in Guadalajara. Cornbread yellow, shit yellow. What the hell did a yellow plaster wall mean? Walton had a throbbing headache, but at least he knew where that came from, so he rinsed his mouth with more brandy before leaving his sweaty bed.

  It was warm outside, too, but it smelled cleaner than indoors. Walking into the early sunlight, all Walton could think of was the shit-yellow wall, and how he’d like to kick it down in his next dream. Behind him, the squat, whitewashed house that served as observation post and refuge was real enough. Men still snored inside, sprawled on its ground floor. Ahead, on the bare expanse of rocky soil, Iñaki Maetzu’s scarecrow silhouette was the only one in sight.

  “He isn’t here yet.” Maetzu anticipated the question without raising his eyes from his work. He’d taken his rifle apart and was oiling each piece. He was a raw-boned shaggy Basque, mean-looking, big-eared, tanned to a leathery brown. “I’d have called you if he’d come.”

  “What time is it?”

  “Don’t know.” Maetzu turned his seamed face eastward. “Maybe six, maybe earlier. Don’t you wear a watch any more?”

  “I can’t remember where I put it.”

  Maetzu snorted derisively. “You were drunk enough when you got back from visiting Remedios.”

  With his back to the sun, fingers hooked, Walton combed back long strands of hair from his forehead and yawned. “I wonder why Lorca isn’t here yet. He should have arrived by now.”

  “Maybe he isn’t coming. As far as I’m concerned, anyone travelling this way just draws attention to us.”

  Walton found himself waking up rapidly now. “Have you seen Marypaz?” he asked, walking off to the fountain. It was free-standing, like a headstone spouting water from a pipe into a cement trough. Walton had wondered from his first day in the sierra where the water came from, how it snaked its way through immense plates of granite. He put his head under the flow, thinking how its hidden voyage through the rock made this water more precious than ever before in his life.

  Maetzu answered the question at last. “No, but I know she’s still mad. She was crying last night, and she said she’ll kill you.”

  Walton dipped his brawny forearms in the water. “At least she’s showing some initiative.”

  He felt fully alert by the time he left the fountain for the zigzagging path leading from the ledge down to the valley. Below, the ravine resembled a wild crystallized landslide. From the foot of the mountain, left of where he stood, El Baluarte rose almost vertically, jutting out and dividing the ledge. Beetling and humped, the cliff’s stony prow hid the Fascist lookout on the other side without obstructing the view of the valley. Eastward, a milder, scruffy ascent rose from the ledge to the chapel of San Martín.

  At this hour there seemed to be no war in Spain. The air, dry and almost unbearably clear, tricked men into thinking they could see forever, into distances too great for Walton to care about. It was a long way from poverty-stricken, winter-ravaged rural Vermont. Even further from working-class Pittsburgh, its smokestacks belching on the tight bend of the river. That was another life already, or a series of lifetimes.

  Walton turned back towards the camp. The camp. He’d known camps in the Great War. Real army camps in France and Flanders, in places with unpronounceable names and long rows of barbed wire, trenches, sandbags. Battlegrounds where men measured up, or came up short. This was a joke of a camp. No artillery, no radio. A hollow in the rocky dirt for ammunition and that run-down squat house covered in peeling whitewash. Part of the roof had caved in and been replaced by sheet iron. Out the back, a ramshackle wall had once safely penned in flocks and fodder. Now horses grazed in it and chased flies from their manes. His men couldn’t agree whether to fly the red flag of the communist PSUC or the anarchist red and black over the roof, so they’d stuck both by the door.

  A hundred or so yards behind the house, past a fenced almond grove, a steep climb led deep into the sierra among naked granite crags. Inferior granite, Walton thought. Back in Vermont it would end up as grout, on the waste pile. The only good thing was that the Fascists, on the other side of El Baluarte, were sitting on a similar piece of lousy rock. Where the ledge sloped up the mountain, Walton’s comrades were stirring, two of them making coffee on an open fire. He recognized Brissot’s black beret and Chernik’s bald head. Chernik saw him and waved. “G’d mawnin’, Felipe!” Despite his Russian battle name he was from the Old South, and “morning” was always “mawnin’” to him. Walton nodded in return.

  Henri Brissot – “Mosko” to everyone here – spooned out coffee grains with the spare motions learned during his medical training, without looking up. In his fifties, with a grizzled bushy moustache, he wore on his beret the badge he’d earned among the Bolsheviks in 1919. Walton had more than once felt the value of the little red star. Over a glass of wine, Mosko had spoken of the self-serving value of history, in his proficient school English. “A Brissot de Warville was Robespierre’s comrade and lost his head to the guillotine in 1793,” he’d said. “That’s the likely end of all moderates in a revolution. I learned my lesson.”

  Rafael and Valentin, little more than boys, squatted
playing cards by the stone fence of the almond grove. Rafael acted surly and proletarian but wore around his neck the silver rosary his mother had given him. As for Valentin, he was laughing, his square horsey teeth showing in a row. A nervous twitch made him blink when he was angry. “Zape!” he cried out now, slapping the cards down while the shy Rafael laid his on the ground with reluctance.

  Walton turned to Maetzu, busy peering through the clean barrel of his rifle. “Iñaki, I don’t like the fact that he hasn’t shown up. I’m going down to see what the hell happened to him.”

  “It’s not like we asked him to come,” Maetzu grumbled. But he buckled a belt and holster around his waist and followed Walton down the ravine.

  Rafael and Valentin looked up when Walton cried out, “Keep your eyes open while we’re gone!” before resuming their game by the orchard wall. On it, a hand-painted sign read in bold red letters, LONG LIVE THE PEOPLE’S ARMY AND THE INTERNATIONAL BRIGADES. DEATH TO THE NATIONALISTS. DEATH TO THE FASCISTS. NO PASARÁN!

  SIERRA DE SAN MARTÍN, THE REBEL “NATIONALIST” ARMY OUTPOST AT RISCAL AMARGO

  On the other side of El Baluarte, the men were just now getting up. As he gained the rim of the ledge, Bora saw a couple of them amble to the left, where a skinny grove of cedars served as a latrine. Barking playfully, Alfonso’s three-legged dog came to meet him. Dead ahead, Sergeant Indalecio Fuentes waited with rifle in hand.

  “No weapons, his hands were not tied,” Bora was soon explaining. “The man had been shot once, in the nape of the neck. I found this in his shirt pocket.” He produced the snapshot.

  Fuentes ran his eyes over the photo and gave it back. Stocky, bearish, wide-jawed and eternally in need of a shave, he grunted out the words like the policeman that he was. “No identification, nothing? Could you tell if he was one of ours?”

  “Nothing. He wore no uniform, ours or Red.”

  Fuentes drove his thumbs into his weathered army belt, repeating to himself what Bora had said in his clipped German accent. “Civilians get killed too,” was his concise wisdom.