Don Petro de la Hoz

Chapter 1: The Day of Heritage

Upon the morning of my Day of Heritage my foster-father buried me alive.

Why did I let him do it?

That’s a question I have often asked myself.

It was because it was my Day of Heritage. Because I’d been afraid I wouldn’t have a Day of Heritage.

Because I didn’t have a father.

Which wasn’t, in itself, especially remarkable. Ours was a fishing village, lots of lads were fatherless. A fishing life is never easy, rarely long. Not that our farmers fared much better. Harvests fail. And people die from accidents and pirates and disease. But all the other boys had somebody: a granddad or an uncle or an elder brother or their mother’s latest husband. Someone who could be a father for the Day. I was the only one who had no dad at all.

I was a foundling, fostered by Dom Inigo, the village priest.

Which is ironic when you think of it. The village called him Father Inigo. He wasn’t in the least paternal.

Fathers can be terrible. Emilio the tavern-keeper’s son was often beaten by his drunken dad. The shadow-sons of Leonardo laboured for their father in his salt-pans day and night while he amused himself reclining with their sisters, stuffing sweetness in between his greedy lips. And in the Book there’s the example of the Patriarch who came within a knife-blade’s width of murdering his only son.

But fathers can be nice as well. When little José hurt himself, he’d run to Malo, seeking comfort. I had never dreamt of going to Dom Inigo. He only understood one side of fatherhood: authority.

And that’s why, in the days before my Day of Heritage, I worried and I worried and I worried that it wouldn’t happen. Not for me. I was afraid Dom Inigo would laugh it off. He’d say it was a pagan custom or he’d tell me that it took more than a Day to make a man. Or he would point out, as he had so often done, that I was fatherless.

As if I needed the reminder.

So you’ll understand me saying I was desperate. I wanted to be like the other boys. Because supposing, just supposing, that I didn’t have a Day of Heritage. What happened then? Would I remain a boy? Now I’m a man and getting on a bit, the thought of everlasting kidhood has a tempting taste to it but children are forever in a rush to reach maturity.

I was already marked out by this curse of being different. The other lads ignored me. No-one ever played with me. Was I invisible? I spent my days alone. To be the only one who didn’t have a Day of Heritage: that was a nightmare that I couldn’t even contemplate.

What happened on a Day of Heritage? I didn’t know. Nobody talked. (They didn’t talk to me, in any case.) So all I knew about the Day of Heritage was knowledge I had overheard - I’ve always been an eager listener. Our village was the sort of place where if you waded out to sea and stood alone and spoke to the horizon, by the time you’d walked back home the things you said would have been passed from villager to villager and analysed and argued over and refuted. I don’t know how this occurred - I always blamed the gulls - but I believed that if I listened hard enough, somebody somewhere would describe their Day of Heritage. Perhaps they’d be comparing notes with those who had already been initiated. Maybe they’d be bragging to their brothers. So I did my best to find out what went on. But all I learned was that a father took his son to somewhere secret. More than that? I was completely in the dark.

So that’s why, when he told me I should go with him, I followed him. I didn’t question him in case he thought again and changed his mind. I didn’t hesitate. I didn’t chatter - children prattle - and I didn’t even flap my arms to scare the squawking birds. I trotted after him and hoped and hoped and hoped the sun would set upon a man who’d had his Day of Heritage.

That’s when he led me in among the graves.

The wind had turned. Cold, howling air cascaded down the mountain slopes to whirlpool widdershins around the church. Its freezing fingers pinched my ill-protected limbs. It gathered in the gown that signified Dom Inigo possessed the learning needed for a priest and puffed him up till he was more than twice his normal size.

Our churchyard wasn’t home to many dead. The Adeltando’s ancestors were buried underneath the flagstones of the church; the fishermen were buried out at sea, to feed the fish; the bodies of the poor were taken out into the desert, whence the shifting of the sands sometimes returned them. Here within the graveyard’s walls was just a scattering of wooden crosses, many of which had been wind-keeled to a flatter angle than a boat caught broadside to the storm. And, huddled in the shadow of the church, there was a single tomb.

It was, in shape, a box, flat-topped, as if it was a bed which could accommodate two people, lying side by side. It often had, in fact, and lying one above the other, too, and one inside the other if you catch my drift. The superstitious villagers believed a child conceived upon its surface couldn’t catch the pestilence. I had myself spied skinny Adan and plump Eva in the act, but their son died as soon as he was born.

Its sides, made out of adamantine desert glass, were black and shiny in a greasy sort of way, and they reflected light in such a manner that it seemed that shadows moved inside the tomb and people thought that they saw devils dancing as they celebrated torturing the damned. Then prayers were muttered, nervous fingers clutched at amulets, and mouth-juice gathered up and launched to splatter on the ground.

Some villagers believed a demon had been buried here - “not in a churchyard,” Malo scoffed - and others thought the tomb contained a saint. The tavern-keeper, who was thought to be an expert in such mysteries, insisted that it had to be a king at least. Dom Inigo, after rebuking me for listening to tittle-tattle, admitted elements of truth in each of these contentions. It was built, he said, back in the days when Abids ruled our land. One of their leaders ordered it to be constructed for his body’s final resting place.

Now we were standing at the dawn end of this sepulchre. Dom Inigo produced a key. He stooped. His fingers plucked away a plug of moss. Behind it was a keyhole into which he pushed the key. It wouldn’t turn. He joggled at it but it wouldn’t turn. He passed the key to me. “You have a go.”

I jammed the key into the lock and twisted. And it turned.

“I must have loosened it,” my foster-father said.

He knelt and put his hand against the stone and pushed. It was a door. It opened.

I stood back. I didn’t want to see the corpse. He laughed at me. The tomb was empty, he explained. He let me look. The space inside was big enough for two but he was right. There was no body there.

Dom Inigo got down upon his hands and knees and crawled a little way inside. I heard the sound of grinding stone. I squatted. It was difficult to see. The glass tomb walls let in a little light but it was twisted, flushed and stained, as if my eyes had opened at the bottom of the sea. What’s more, his buttocks or his back or else his arms were always in the way. I heard him grunting. I could see the sinews straining in his neck. He was shoving at the square-shaped paving stones that lined the floor. Eight flagstones, or there should have been. The one in the far corner of the tomb was missing. As I watched, Dom Inigo pushed even harder and the stone adjacent to the vacancy slid sideways, so the gap was filled. But now there was another space, so now Dom Inigo began to tussle with the stone next door to that. And piece by piece, as in a game of shifting tiles, he shuffled stones, until the last one that he moved revealed there was an opening, a pit, beneath it.

“What’s that? Some sort of shaft?” I asked.

He wriggled backwards. Once he’d cleared the tomb he clambered to his feet. “You get in there,” he said.

I looked at him, my mouth agape. His clothes, especially around his knees, were filthy, and his hands were torn and scratched, the knuckles lined with graveyard dirt. I knew those hands were only used for praying and for writing and for eating and for slapping me. And now they had been shovels. I was too surprised to squawk.

“We haven’t time to dawdle. In the hole.”

“I can’t,” I said. “It isn’t big enough.” The gap beneath the stone was, I supposed, about as wide as me. I don’t like being squashed. Small spaces smother me.

“You’ll fit.”

“But.” I was scared. Wells can be very, very deep. I don’t like heights. The thought of falling endlessly.

I shook my head.

He said one word: “Obedience.”

The thing that he cared most about.

An ox or ass can kick back at his driver and a slave can lie down in the dust and die, but when Dom Inigo said ‘do it’, it was done.

I shook my head.

“This is what happens on your Day of Heritage,” he told me. “Don’t you know?”

I didn’t. As I’ve said, I’d tried to piece together broken bits of rumour. I had not had much success. But what he said made sense. Emilio, whose father owned the inn, was taken down into the cellar where he spent the day among the jars and butts. Santino’s father was a fisherman and took him out to sea upon his boat. The farmer’s son went out into the orchard.

I supposed the business of a priest is with the dead.

“What will the ruler of the Abids say if I invade his privacy?”

“He won’t say anything. He isn’t there.”

“Suppose I meet a spiderwolf?”

He laughed. He said, again, “obedience.”

He never says it more than twice.

So I got down onto my hands and knees. I looked into the hole. My eyes felt coldness. I could smell the slimy dampness. And the silence. That was palpable.

“Turn round, you fool. It will be easier. Crawl backwards till your feet are hovering above the shaft and then lie on your belly. That’s the way. Now wriggle till you dangle. Just like that. And now let go.”

I clutched the well’s rim with a dead-man’s grasp but really I was hanging on to hope. The hope that this might be some sort of test.

I kicked my feet. I danced on air. The shaft had widened out. I couldn’t reach the sides. I didn’t know how far I had to fall.

“How deep is it?”

“Just deep enough.”

Dom Inigo unhooked my fingers one by one until my grip was broken and I dropped into the darkness.

Chapter 2: Entombed

If I remembered all the details of that day, I’d suffer all its terrors now and now again. But the most dreadful of the horrors I experienced have been obliterated like the footprints on a freshly wave-washed beach.

We say God must be merciful when things are not as awful as they might have been.

So here’s what I remember.

How I fell.

I crumpled as I landed.

Ouch!

I jarred my knees. I toppled sideways and I bruised my thigh. I bashed my elbow and I knocked the air out of my body. Oof!

At least I hadn’t fallen very far.

Where was I?

In the dark.

There was a little patch of light that trickled, hollowed and exhausted, from the opening above. A shrinking rectangle of light. The sound of grinding. “No!” Dom Inigo was sliding back the stones. “No. Don’t.”

“Be silent.”

That was all. And then the rectangle became a slit, the slit a crack, the crack a line, the line a nothingness.

I don’t believe that Hell is made from devils, mocking laughter, torments, flames or anything like that. I think it’s darkness. Silence. Emptiness. If there is torture it is nothing that can be inflicted bodily. It‘s terror. It is doubt. Uncertainty. Not knowing what lies there, behind the darkness. What is waiting in the silence. What it wants.

It’s loneliness.

I started crying.

I don’t know how long that lasted. I was lost in timelessness. But then I told myself I wasn’t dead, at least not yet, and if I was to be forgotten then at least for now I knew that I was me.

And I stood up and tried to reach the roof and found that I could feel it if I stretched. And then I spread my arms out sideways to discover that I couldn’t touch the sides. So I stepped left a pace and then another. Then I felt a wall.

My fingertips explored it. Mostly mud with, here and there, a lump of something harder. Stone? Or bone? It crossed my mind that I was buried in a graveyard. I must be surrounded by the bodies of the dead. Perhaps they’d sensed a new arrival. Maybe they were lonely. Were they reaching out to me? “Leave me alone,” I whispered to the darkness. “I’m alive. Not one of you. Not yet.”

But no. What I was touching must be stone. I felt its signature frigidity. And there were sharpnesses. The pieces of a skeleton are mostly smooth, unless it has been shattered.

I was scared of getting lost. I’d moved two steps from where I’d dropped. I told myself I should go back and wait.

For what?

For rescue.

Did I really think that he was coming back for me?

I swallowed hard to keep myself from vomiting my courage. I resolved to grope my way along the wall and hope that this was not a chamber but a passage.

But suppose it were a labyrinth? I’d read about the hero who had been abandoned in the maze. I knew I wouldn’t find a minotaur: he’d vanquished it. But there were spiderwolves and they lurked underground to trap their unsuspecting prey. Suppose this was the burrow of a spiderwolf? I froze. Was I about to feel her hairy tentacles envelop me? My skin was shivering, expecting to be punctured by her fangs. I knew what happened next. I had been told by Serenissima. She said that spiderwolves bit into flesh and sucked. She said they drained their victims of all liquid - black and yellow bile, and blood, and pus - to leave them dessicated. I’d be mummified. It wouldn’t even leave me tears with which to mourn myself.

But if there was a spiderwolf in here why had she not attacked me yet?

I took a long, slow breath that drew the air down deep into the crinkles of my lungs. I started shuffling along the wall but then I stopped. I needed to take bigger steps and count them. And, remembering the labyrinth, I ought to be unwinding thread to mark my route so that I could retrace my steps.

The only cord I had was belted round my waist.

I took it off and placed it on the floor to show my starting point. It was the best that I could do.

And then I started walking.

I was stopped in two more steps.

Another wall. So far as I could tell from touching, this new wall was perpendicular to that which I had followed. I explored the corner with my hands. A right angle? It seemed to be. So that suggested that this cavity was square-shaped or at least rectangular.

I followed it around the sides until I stepped again upon my belt. It was confirmed. There were four sides and each was roughly four steps long. And there was no way out.

I’m not the sort of person to give way to gloom. Acedia, that sense of melancholic hopelessness, was just about the only deadly sin I’d not committed in the years before my Day of Heritage. But, trapped in sightlessness and silence in a cubicle beneath the earth, I let myself surrender to despair.

Why was I here? I asked myself. Was this a test to judge if I was worthy of my Day of Heritage? Or had Dom Inigo abandoned me?

I tried to think. There had to be a clue in how he had behaved before he brought me here. How he had been. If I could think about what happened, what they’d said ... I had to reconstruct this morning from its birth.

It started out like any other day. I woke at dawn. Already I could hear the sounds of Serenissima. I heard her shuffle in her shrouded feet across the kitchen floor. She sighed. She banged the mugs onto the tabletop. I heard the muted jangle of her keys as she unlocked the pantry door. It stuck. I heard her curse. I heard her shake it free.

Then I remembered that it was my Day of Heritage.

At last the cupboard opened. I could hear her mutter as she trudged back to the trestle. She was pouring ale: I heard it splattering against the bottom of each cup.