Cathedral of the Sea

By order of the king, the executions had been carried out immediately. There was not even time to build a scaffold, and so the prisoners were hanged from carts.

Arnau stopped running as soon as he got to Plaza del Blat. He was panting, out of breath. The square was full of silent people standing with their backs to him, staring at... Above their heads, next to the palace, hung ten lifeless bodies.

“No! ... Father!”

His anguished cry echoed round the square. Hundreds of heads turned toward him. Arnau walked slowly through the crowd, which pulled back to let him through. He searched the ten dead faces...

“AT LEAST LET me go and tell the priest,” Pere’s wife pleaded.

“I’ve already told him. He must be there by now.”

When he identified his father, Arnau vomited. The people around him jumped back. The boy took another look at the swollen purplish black face, tilted to one side, with its contorted features and eyes that were fighting now for all eternity to burst from their sockets. His father’s tongue lolled lifelessly from the corner of his mouth. The second and third times he looked, all Arnau brought up was bile.

He felt a hand on his shoulder.

“We should go, my boy,” said Father Albert.

The priest tried to pull him in the direction of Santa Maria, but Arnau would not move. He looked over again at his father, and shut his eyes. He would never be hungry again. Arnau trembled like a leaf. Father Albert tried again to pull him away from the macabre scene.

“Leave me, Father, please.”

With the priest and the others in the square looking on, Arnau ran unsteadily over to the improvised gallows. He was clutching his stomach and was still shaking all over. When he reached his father, he turned toward one of the soldiers standing guard beside the bodies.

“Can I take him down?” he asked.

Faced with the boy’s insistent gaze from below his father’s body, the soldier hesitated. What would his own children have done if he had been hanged?

“No,” he had to tell him. If only he could have been somewhere else! He would have preferred to be fighting a band of Moors, or to be with his children ... What kind of death was this? The hanged man had simply been fighting for his children, for this boy begging him with his eyes, like everyone else in the square. Where was the city magistrate? “The magistrate has ordered that they be left hanging in the square for three days.”

“I’ll wait.”

“After that they are to be placed above the city gates, like everyone executed in Barcelona, so that anyone passing by will heed the laws.”

With that, the soldier turned his back on Arnau and continued his patrol round the hanged bodies.

“Hunger,” he heard behind him. “He was only hungry.”

When his futile patrol brought him back alongside Bernat’s body, the boy was sitting on the ground beneath him, head in hands, crying. The soldier hardly dared look at him.

“Come with me, Arnau,” said the priest, who had joined him again.

Arnau shook his head. Father Albert was about to say something, but a sudden shout silenced him. The families of the other victims were arriving in the square. Mothers, wives, children, and brothers flocked round the hanged men. They were silent except for the occasional howl of grief. The soldier went on his way again, trying to remember the war cries of the heathen foe. Joan, who had to pass through the square on his way home, saw the terrible spectacle and fainted. He did not even have time to notice Arnau, who still sat in the same spot, rocking himself back and forth. Joan’s schoolmates picked him up and took him into the bishop’s palace. Arnau did not see his brother either.

The hours went by. Arnau was oblivious to the comings and goings of townspeople visiting the square out of a sense of pity or morbid curiosity. Only the sound of the soldier’s boots pacing up and down seemed to bring him out of himself.

“Arnau, I gave up everything I had for you to be free. Although they had belonged to the Estanyol family for centuries, I left our lands so that nobody could do to you what they had done to me, to my father and my father’s father ... and now we’re back in the same situation, at the mercy of people who call themselves noble. But there’s a big difference: we can say no. My son, learn to use the freedom it’s cost us so much to win. You and only you can decide.”

“Is it true we can refuse, Father?” The soldier’s boots passed in front of his eyes once more. “Where there is hunger there is no freedom. You aren’t hungry anymore, Father. What about our freedom?”

“Take a good look at them, children.”

That voice ...