The first thing he realised was that the donkey was not where he had left it. He saw, too, that the manacle around his wrist consisted of an iron ring with a padlock on it. He tried to break open the padlock by striking it on the table, then on the floor, but without success. He looked around him in search of something that might help, but could see only food and drink. Having trudged across that vast plain on a meagre diet of almonds and goat’s milk, there he was surrounded by food, but manacled to a pillar.
He tried to think through his situation: he was a prisoner, the cripple had disappeared, and the donkey wasn’t where he had left it. Despite being possibly the only person in the province with enough food to last a whole year, the cripple had fled, leaving him a captive. He imagined the plank on its ball-bearing wheels being pulled along by the pig, just as the cripple had described to him. Or, the boy wondered, had the cripple’s desire for freedom been so great that he had abandoned everything and made off with the old donkey? At least he hadn’t killed him in order to do so. He thought of the goatherd. He imagined him lying at the foot of the castle wall, about to breathe his last. The crows perched on the head of the Christ figure or on one of the corbels, awaiting their moment. The goats maddened by the lack of water. He realised that if he didn’t escape, he might well meet the same fate. He would die of hunger and thirst, chained to that pillar. Seeking consolation, he thought of his family, but his family were the reason he was there.
On the table was the plate from which he had eaten, surrounded by splinters of wood and bits of broken chair. With one hand he cleared a space so that he could sit down and only then did he notice something that his urgent desire to eat had prevented him from seeing before. On one corner of the table, next to an enamel bowl, was a tin ashtray. It contained a single brown cigarette end, the sight of which made the blood drain from his face and his stomach contract with fear. Then he understood why the cripple had fled, and the only thing he felt then was a need to get out of there and catch up with the man who was intent on betraying him.
He tried to put his ideas in order. He didn’t know how long he had been asleep, nor how much time had passed since the cripple had left. All he knew was that he had to reach him before he found the bailiff. He again struggled with the manacle, trying various positions that would allow him to remove his hand, until the metal, cutting into his flesh, became too painful. He looked around for some useful implement, but the cripple had made sure to remove any object that could be turned into a tool. The only thing he could reach was the cured meat hanging on hooks from the wall, doubtless left there by his jailer in order to keep him alive until he returned with the bailiff. He wondered how much of a reward they were offering.
He moved as close as he could to the wall in order to reach the meat. He tugged hard at a piece of salt pork, tearing it off the hook on which it hung. He squeezed and massaged the meat with his hands, rubbed the fat onto his manacled wrist and tried to extricate his hand by sliding it out — to no avail. He then energetically greased the metal ring itself, as if that might soften it. The rancid smell of the grease mingled with the stench given off by his own body. He then grasped the metal ring with his free hand and pulled with his trapped hand, meanwhile turning it inside the ring. He tried gripping the ring between his knees and pulling with both hands, but this proved so painful he had to stop.
With his elbows resting on the table and the manacle slightly below his wrist, he then worked on flexing his thumb. He again greased and massaged the base of the joint, feeling for it much as his mother used to do when carving a chicken. Then, with his fingers squeezed together on either side of his thumb, and when both hand and brain were ready, he rolled up the napkin he had used earlier and placed it between his teeth. Finally, he hooked the ring over a metal fitting on the table and pulled as hard as he could. He felt the ring tearing the skin on his thumb and felt how his greased knuckles were pushed together to fit the ring imprisoning them. At one point, his hand remained stuck fast, and he couldn’t pull any more. His skin burned and the pressure was almost unbearable. Weeping, he placed the sole of his boot against the thick table leg and, grasping his manacled wrist with his free hand, gave one final tug that propelled him backwards onto the sacks behind him. He spat out the napkin and, sobbing loudly, held up his hand to examine it, but with the windows closed, there wasn’t enough light to see. He drew back the bolt on the street door and went outside where the late-afternoon sky was tinged with orange. His thumb was so thick with blood that he couldn’t tell how bad the wound was. He went back inside and made straight for the barrel of water. He removed the cork and allowed the water to run freely over the wound. He drank some of the water too, then put the cork back. A strip of wrinkled skin was hanging loose from his thumb. The iron ring had cut him to the bone. He pressed his wounded hand to his chest and, clutching it with his other hand, wept out of pain and rage.
He carefully placed the strip of skin over the bone and smoothed it out as best he could to cover the wound. He then wrapped his hand in the napkin and, with the help of his teeth, tied a knot. The cloth immediately turned red with blood.
Before going out into the street again, he put two chorizos in his knapsack, along with a knife, some matches, a bottle of water and another of wine. He calculated that he still had two or three hours of daylight left. A trail of hoofprints and narrow wheel tracks led out of the village along the road by which he had entered. He adjusted the straps on his knapsack, pressed his wounded hand to his chest and began to run.
It was almost dark when he spotted the donkey trotting slowly southwards along a straight road flanked by ditches. The sole of the boy’s boot had now come completely loose, and for some time he had been half-running, half-walking, with the front part of the sole flopping about like a black tongue. Now and then, some grit got into the boot, but he only stopped to empty it out when bothered by something really sharp. As he closed on his objective, he slowed down and kept to the side of the road, thinking that he could at least throw himself into one of the ditches if the cripple were to sense his presence and look back. When he was about a hundred yards away, he got a clear view of the cripple’s makeshift wagon. He had made a kind of horse collar from a length of rope, one end of which he had tied to the plank to be used much like the reins on a yoke of oxen. He was beating the donkey with a stick as the ramshackle buggy skimmed clumsily over the ground. The donkey was once again laden with four panniers, two of which, the boy noticed, contained his water flasks. The only possible way this could have happened was for the cripple — no longer strapped to his plank, but resting all his weight on the stumps of his knees — somehow to have removed the flasks from the donkey’s back, put new panniers on and lifted the water flasks into the panniers.
The cripple must be a very greedy man, the boy thought, to undertake a journey like that just for a reward, and this again made him wonder what price the bailiff had put on his head.
With only a few yards left before he caught up with them, the boy took even more care not to be seen. When he felt sure he could not possibly miss, he bent down, picked up a sharp stone about the size of a large potato and aimed it at the cripple’s head. However, the stone whizzed past its intended target and struck the donkey squarely on the rump, causing the donkey, entirely out of character, to buck and bray furiously. It reached round to lick its wounded haunch and kicked wildly in all directions, one of those kicks striking the cripple on the forehead, rendering him unconscious. The donkey then began to trot aimlessly down the road, as if its load were as light as a feather, dragging the cripple’s inert body, still strapped to the plank, from one side of the road to the other. The man’s head bounced limply over the stones. Then the donkey calmed down slightly, turned and galloped back towards the boy, slowing its pace as it got nearer and stopping just short of the boy’s feet. Stunned by the violence of what he’d just seen, the boy stared at the donkey as if he had tamed a fierce bull through the sheer power of thought. He held out his hand and the donkey approached meekly and sniffed his fingers. The edges of the plank had made ruts in the surface of the dirt road, marks blurred by the cripple’s slewing body. The boy slid his hand under the donkey’s jaw and stroked the loose skin. The donkey kept snorting like an angry child until it had fully recovered from the pain inflicted by that stone.