Chapter 2 #2
The young man from Castile finally stopped and looked at Rodrigo. Then at the nobles accompanying him.
And he answered calmly:
"Thank God."
The other cadets held their breath. Rodrigo turned red with anger, but Alejandro simply went on his way — for the first time, he did not feel inferior.
Although the Academy's fame was tied to mathematics and engineering, its students remained officers of the King's army. And officers needed to know how to fight.
In the first week of combat training, the new cadets were led to the weapons yard.
The place was wide, ringed by stone walls, and covered in fine sand.
Hundreds of blade marks scored the walls.
Some looked old.
Others had been made recently.
The weapons master, a veteran with a face marked by scars, walked slowly before the students.
"A dead engineer builds no walls."
The cadets remained silent.
"A dead mathematician calculates no trajectories."
He drew his sword.
"And a dead officer serves no King."
Training blades were handed out.
When Alejandro took hold of his, he immediately noticed the problem.
It was nothing like handling farm tools.
Nothing like the sticks he used to play soldier with as a child.
"Guard!"
The practice swords rose.
Alejandro tried to copy the other cadets' movements — he had it wrong.
Rodrigo noticed immediately. "The peasant holds a sword like a hoe."
The nobles laughed. Minutes later, Rodrigo asked to face him. The result was humiliating. Within seconds Alejandro was down in the sand, then again, and again.
By the end of the class his arms were shaking and his pride ached more than his muscles. Unlike the other defeated cadets, he did not leave. He stayed in the yard, training alone until sunset.
From atop the wall, Don Luiz watched in silence.
One of the instructors approached him.
"Should I send the boy to rest?"
Don Luiz crossed his arms.
"No."
"He's going to pass out."
The captain smiled.
"Maybe."
His gaze stayed on Alejandro.
"But tomorrow he'll be better than today."
When he was given the assignment of inspecting the dungeons of Montju?c, Alejandro was already considered one of the Academy's greatest prospects.
He did not know it yet. But behind the damp bars of that underground vault he would find another young man just as intelligent as himself — a boy who had never opened a book, a thief, a survivor thrown into the cold darkness, named Mateo — and that meeting would change them both forever.
The descent into the dungeons of Montju?c always brought an unpleasant feeling. The air grew heavier with each step, the light dimmed, the smell of sea salt mixed with mold, rust, and human sweat.
Alejandro walked at the head of the detachment, carrying an oil lantern. The flames danced inside the glass, casting warped shadows across the stone walls.
Behind him, two cadets talked in low voices; neither of them liked that place. Stories about the underground cells circulated all over Barcelona — driven-mad prisoners, smugglers, murderers, pirates, and men who had vanished without a trace.
Alejandro had never much believed in superstitions — stones obeyed physics, people obeyed self-interest.
Everything else was stories invented to frighten children.
Still, there was something unsettling about that corridor.
The bars seemed to swallow the light. The sounds seemed to die before reaching the end of the gallery. And then he heard it.
Tap. Tap. Tap.
A rhythmic sound, methodical, almost calculated. Alejandro raised the lantern; the sound came from an isolated cell. There sat the young man — thin, disheveled, filthy, sitting on the floor as if he owned the place — tapping a small bone against the wall.
Tap. Tap. Tap. The young man did not even look up.
He kept working, like a focused craftsman, like an engineer examining a structure.
Alejandro approached, and it was in that instant he realized it: the boy wasn't tapping at random.
He was testing the stone. Listening to the vibrations.
Searching for points of tension. Exactly as a fortifications expert would.
That was impossible — most officers at the Academy would take years to develop that kind of perception, yet this prisoner seemed to understand structures by instinct.
"If you keep digging there, you'll drown." The bone stopped.
Very slowly, the boy raised his head. His dark eyes met Alejandro's — no fear, no submission, only curiosity and amusement. The smile came slowly, as if he'd found something interesting.
"Ah..." He tilted his head. "So they've finally sent someone who knows how to use his brain."
Alejandro ignored the taunt and crouched before the bars. "The water runs behind that wall."
He pointed at the structure. "The pressure will destroy your cell before it ever opens a passage."
The boy looked in the direction indicated.
Then smiled again.
"That's exactly why I'm not trying to open a passage."
Alejandro frowned.
Then came the explanation.
And as Mateo spoke, Alejandro felt a chill run up his spine, because the prisoner was right — completely right.
When he finished the calculations in his head, he realized the boy had identified a critical point of the structure just by observing the stones, without books, without teachers, without instruments.
Just by looking — something many engineers would never manage to do. For the first time, Alejandro was genuinely impressed. Not by the audacity, but by the intelligence.
When the sergeant called the detachment to go back up, Alejandro cast one last glance at the cell. Mateo had already gone back to work. Tap. Tap. Tap. As if the conversation had never happened.
That night, Alejandro couldn't sleep.
The other cadets snored. The wind blew off the sea.
But his mind stayed caught on that encounter.
He thought of Rodrigo de Alarcón, thought of the sons of the nobility, thought of the Academy's professors.
All of them had received an education since childhood — books, tutors, opportunities.
Mateo had none of that. And yet his mind was as sharp as any student at the Academy, perhaps sharper — and that unsettled him, because it called many certainties into question.
After all... how many brilliant men were rotting in prisons?
How many geniuses were dying at work in the fields?
How many talents would never be discovered simply because they'd been born into the wrong family?
Alejandro turned over in bed. The dark ceiling seemed to watch him. For the first time he began to suspect that the world was far more unjust than he had imagined, and that mathematics might not be able to explain it.
Months later, a new letter arrived from distant Castile. The uneven handwriting immediately revealed the sender.
Gaspar Manoel de La Vega. Alejandro sat down near the window. He opened the envelope carefully. Inside was only a single sheet.
Son, your mother says my letters need to sound more educated. I don't know how to write that way.
The olive trees survived the winter. Your brother is still lazy, your sister is still bossing him around, and I'm still old. We heard your grades are among the best. I don't know exactly what that means, but it sounds important.
Study, work, learn everything you can. I don't want you to come back rich, I want you to come back greater than I ever was. Your father.
Alejandro sat still for a moment, then folded the letter carefully and put it away with his mother's letter and the De La Vega ring. And, for the first time in many months, he smiled.
The Academy had organized a live-fire demonstration at the Montju?c testing grounds, attended by generals and inspectors of the Crown who had come directly from Madrid.
The challenge set by the professors was considered impossible for a cadet: calculate the exact parabola and align a heavy bronze cannon to strike a moving target — an old military barge being towed offshore across the choppy waters of the Mediterranean, rocking with the waves and the cutting wind.
The noble-blooded cadets failed one after another. Their calculations ignored the sea wind's speed or air resistance, and their iron shot threw up huge columns of salt water far from the target, drawing yawns and looks of disdain from the generals in the stands.
When it was Alejandro's turn, the yard fell silent with sarcastic smiles. A peasant operating the army's most complex machine seemed like a joke to the aristocrats.
Alejandro, however, did not use the memorized methods of the French manuals.
He approached the artillery piece carrying only a brass compass, a piece of charcoal, and a wooden drawing board.
His brown eyes moved back and forth between the barge rising and falling on the waves and the geometric calculations he had exhaustively scribbled onto the stone walls by candlelight.
He calculated the towing speed, the weight of the powder, the angle of the terrain, and the exact vector of the coastal wind.