The Ground

The soldiers had closed the road before the crew arrived. They stood in a double line across the western approach, and the sergeant at the barrier let Diogo and his men through as far as the trench, which lay on the near side of his line. Beyond the trench the road belonged to the crowd.

Out in the open ground between the highway and the river stood a scaffold where yesterday there had been stubble. It had gone up in the night. Torches still burned at its corners, pale against the grey.

The foreman said: they read the sentence yesterday. The Távoras, the old Marquise first, then her sons. The Duke of Aveiro's house to be pulled down and the ground sown with salt. They've been building ever since.

Diogo looked at it as he looked at any structure, and it was well made. The platform was true, the stair raked at an honest angle, the uprights braced in two directions by someone who knew what a crowd's weight against a rail would do. At the far end two crosses of squared timber stood raised on posts, and beneath them a trestle held a row of iron bars. He had known since September what this field would hold. Knowing had been a drawing. This was the built thing.

By seven the field was full. Belém had come, and half the city behind it. Soldiers ringed the edge. On a rise stood a stand hung with crimson, and the court on it, and the King among them, the foreman said, though at that distance he was only a dark coat and a pale face.

The Tower stood a short way beyond, on its rock at the river's edge. The foreman followed his look. He said: the Marquise's priest is in there, the Italian. They say they've left him where he can hear it.

A man in that cell would hear all of it and see none. Diogo thought of the grille, a foot across and green with damp, and of the voice that had preached to the stone behind it.

He took out his notebook, a new one; the other, with the margin entry, lay in the archive under an accession number. The foreman said: what's the use of writing it?

For whoever reads it, Diogo said, and wrote the date, the place and the hour.

A drum began. They brought the old woman first. She came up the stair between two priests, small in black, and was seated on a chair, and a cloth was tied across her eyes. The field made a sound he had never heard from a crowd, one breath drawn in by thousands and held. The executioner stepped behind her. The sword came down once.

The breath went out of the field. The point of Diogo's pencil had gone through the paper.

He turned to a clean page and wrote the date again.

They brought the sons. The first was bound to the cross and raised, and the iron rose and fell, and each stroke reached him across the field flat and distinct, a moment after he saw it land. He found he was counting, as he counted paces, and could not stop. He counted to the last. Beside him the foreman had taken off his hat and held it against his chest with both hands, and the crew had knelt in the spoil heap where they stood.

There were more of them than he had thought a morning could hold.

When the last was done, the soldiers heaped brushwood against the scaffold and set the whole structure alight, platform, crosses and all that lay on it. The smoke leaned across the road. The crowd began to leave around it, and nobody spoke.

The foreman put his hat back on. He said: do we dig, senhor?

Diogo looked at the trench, the settlement still waiting where he had left it in December. He said: open the joint.

The crew rose from the spoil heap. He knelt at the corrected course, laid the level on the stone, and watched the bubble creep to the centre and hold. Behind him the scaffold burned.