He had begun to read his breviary when Guzmán, his sweating face and stained clothing showing signs of the prolonged hunt, parted the flap of the tent and advised El Señor that the hart had just been brought to camp. He apologized: the rain had altered the tracks; the hart had been chased and killed at some distance from the site reserved for El Señor’s pleasure.
El Señor shivered and his breviary fell to the ground; his impulse was to pick it up, he even bent forward slightly, but like a flash Guzmán was kneeling before his Lord; he picked up the book of devotions to hand to his master. From his kneeling position Guzmán, as he looked up to proffer the breviary, for an instant looked directly at El Señor, and he must have arched an eyebrow in a manner that offended his Liege; but El Señor could find no fault in his servant’s celerity in demonstrating his obedience and respect; the visible act was that of the perfect vassal, although the secret intent of that glance lent itself, and all the more for being ill-defined, to interpretations El Señor wished both to accept and to forget.
Guzmán’s wound grazed the wound on El Señor’s hand; the handkerchiefs that bound them were of very different quality, but the scratches caused by a spiked collar were identical.
El Señor arose and Guzmán, not waiting for his Lord to express his intention — would he continue reading? would he come out to the fire? — already held the Biscayan cloak in his hands, ready to assist his master.
“I did well to bring a cloak,” El Señor commented.
“The good huntsman never trusts the weather,” said Guzmán.
El Señor stood motionless as his chief huntsman placed the cape about his shoulders. Then Guzmán, bowing deferentially, again lifted the tent flap and waited for El Señor, face hidden beneath the hood, to step out to the blazing bonfires. El Señor left the tent, then paused before the body of the hart stretched on the ground before his feet.
One of the huntsmen, knife in hand, approached the hart. El Señor looked at Guzmán; Guzmán raised a hand: the huntsman tossed his dagger and the lieutenant caught it in the air. He knelt beside the hart and with one swift, sure motion of the hunting knife slashed the throat from ear to ear.
He cut off the horns and then slit the skin above the rear hoofs, breaking the joints to expose the tendons.
He rose and ordered the men to hang the hart by its tendons and skin it.
He returned the knife to the huntsman and stood watching; between Guzmán and El Señor hung the cadaver of the hart.
The men slit the hide of the animal from hock to anus, and from there in a line down the middle of the belly. They spread open the gash and removed the bladder, the stomach, and the entrails; they threw these organs into the bucket filling drop by drop with the hart’s blood.
El Señor was grateful for the double mask of the night and his hood; nevertheless, Guzmán was observing him in the wavering firelight. The huntsmen cut open the chest to the breastbone and removed the lights, the liver, and the heart. Guzmán held out his hand, and the heart was handed to him; the other viscera plopped into the bucket of blood with a sound identical to that of the beating of El Señor’s troubled heart. Unconsciously, El Señor clasped his hands in a gesture of pity; Guzmán caressed the hilt of his dagger.
The head was severed at the back of the neck, and although the task of quartering the hart continued, El Señor, in the flickering firelight, could see only the head, that stupid-looking, that slack-jawed, that excruciatingly pitiful head deprived of its crown. The dark, glassy, half-open eyes still simulated life, but behind them, triumphant, lurked the specter of death.
Now several huntsmen cut the tripe into small pieces, toasted them over the fire, then dipped and stirred them in blood and bread. And if previously only the hart’s body had separated El Señor from his lieutenant as they skinned, dehorned, and quartered the animal, now there was a world between them. The blood and bread and tripe were brought to the bonfire; the huntsmen stood in a circle around the blaze, along with the hounds that had participated in the hunt. With one hand the men restrained the dogs; in the other they held their hunting horns. El Señor’s traditional position of eminence had for the moment been preempted by the excitement and confusion. The distraction of the nervous, panting hounds and the men’s absorption in the double task of managing dogs and horns would have allowed the Liege to slip back to his tent and renew his pious reading without anyone’s being the wiser, but he knew there was still one formality demanding his attention. An order, a casual gesture, and the huntsmen would blow their horns in unison, signaling the ritual end of the hunt.
In that obscurity to which he’d been relegated, El Señor started to give the signal, but at that very moment the huntsmen blew their horns. The ringing blast from those great curved instruments shook the night, a hoarse lamentation seeming not to fly but to gallop on iron-shod hoofs across the hard-baked drum of the earth to the mountains from which it had been torn. Although El Señor had never given the signal, the ritual had been fulfilled. It was too late. He stood stupefied, his unheeded gesture frozen in mid-air. He was thankful Guzmán was not beside him, grateful he was engrossed in the activity that absorbed them all, that he had not seen the startled face, the half-open mouth whose ritual command had been fulfilled — without word or gesture of the Liege.
At the sound of the horns, the hounds had strained forward to be fed, their greedy muzzles and trembling loins illuminated in the glow of the firelight. Surrounded by the ravenous pack, Guzmán dangled the hart’s entrails at javelin tip, high above their heads. The hounds snapped and leaped. Maddened by the deafening horn blast and their own natural savagery, they were a flowing river of luminous flesh; their tongues were sparks flashing against a sweating, happy Guzmán, javelin held high, feeding the hart’s entrails to hounds that would relish the treat and greedily await the next hunt. El Señor turned from the spectacle; he was obsessed by an infinite and circular thought.
As the dogs smeared their muzzles in blood and charcoal, Guzmán, with the point of his knife, traced a cross on the heart of the stag, then deftly divided it into four portions. He chuckled dryly as he tossed one portion to each point of the compass; the huntsmen laughed with him, well pleased with the day, and with every spirited gesture of the chief huntsman; thus exorcising the evil eye, they shouted: to Pater Noster, to Ave Maria, to the Credo, and Salve Regina.
“Sire,” said Guzmán, as finally he approached El Señor. “It is Your Mercy’s pleasure to distribute the rewards and punishments of the day.”
And he added, smiling, grimy, wounded, exhausted: “Do it now, for these men are tired and wish to return as soon as possible to the shelter.”
“Who was first at the kill?” asked El Señor.
“I, Sire,” replied his chief huntsman.
“You returned just in time,” said El Señor, cradling his chin on his fist.
“I don’t understand, Sire.”
Thoughtfully, El Señor toyed with his thick lower lip. No one could realize that the Liege’s eyes, hidden beneath the hood of his cape, were examining his lieutenant’s boots and that upon them he observed traces of the black sand of the coast, so different from the dry brown mountain dirt. For the first time, Guzmán noticed on his Liege’s hand the wound that was the counterpart to his own, and irresolute and perturbed, he hid his hand. Reward and punishment? El Señor and Guzmán thought simultaneously: For whom? They thought of each other and of themselves, of the dog Bocanegra, and the frustrated and rebellious band of lookouts.