Travels with my Donkey

windless scorcher was well under way by the time I left Los Arcos behind, poppies and cornflowers bright but limp by an undulating camino. The desperate slips and slides of mud-struggling pilgrims were kiln hardened in its surface, like the tracks of a long-extinct species fleeing some now incomprehensible climactic extremity. Revved up by a cebada power breakfast, Shinto made good speed through more bark-echo ghost towns, better speed almost than me: my drawn-out spiritual awakening had meant a Mars-bar supper uncomfortably dispatched during yet another Cinderella dash back to the albergue.
    The camino plaited restlessly about the N111, meaning exposure to more weekend club cyclists — hot and hilly it might be, but there was always breath to spare for a gasped hee-haw — and detours round a couple of poignant Friday-night wipe-outs, roof down in the verge. Boccadillos in an almond orchard and an invigorating hatful of fountain presaged what would become the default afternoon pastime: the drawn-out reeling in of one's intended destination beneath a merciless sun. Topping the day's final hill the town of Viana seemed so close that with an effort I might have reached out and tickled its belfries, yet it was three long hours before I could slump messily against a wall in the refugio 's panoramic garden.
    Beside me the beanpole Australian worked his slow and sinuous way through a t'ai chi routine, cool in the cragged shadows of an ensuite Gothic ruin. In the flat green distance barber-striped factory chimneys announced the presence of Logroño, tomorrow's urban assault course. Somewhere before it Navarra became Rioja — cheers! — and somewhere before that, in fact at the foot of the plain-presiding precipice on which Viana is built, was Shinto, tied to a hunk of reinforced concrete in an acre of wasteland claustrophobically dense with triffidy weeds. My jungly nightmare was his smorgasbord, but it seemed terribly lonely down there. He deserved better: today he'd done well, today he'd been Shints, or Shin Splints, or Shindig, or Shizza, with the more pungent nicknames left in the Los Arcos locker. Still, there was nothing to be done — he'd been dispatched there not by me but by robust decree of the guardia civil, whose on-call donk squad had arrived with alarming alacrity at the refugio receptionist's telephonic behest.
    Viana was an appealing little town, built on the usual model: unhealthy and decrepit tenement outskirts giving way almost without warning to aged, cobbled comeliness. Showered and rehydrated I set off to explore it, sipping ruminatively from what may have been Europe's cheapest can of beer. It was a weekend, but after seven days of tumble-weeded main squares it still seemed odd how much more exuberantly alive were the town dwellers in this part of Navarre. There must be something in the water. Probably gin.
    In the town's prettiest plaza, maroon-haired mothers — evidently another regional feature — paraded their flounced-up offspring around the central fountain. The weekend wardrobe of Spain's under tens proved a dependable jaw slackener: boys in sailor suits is one thing, but I passed a trio done up like General Pinochet, with gold bands from dress-jacket cuff to elbow and heavy loops of braid all over their chests. I wound my way through this junior junta, eyes on the flagstones. Somewhere round here, set in the pavement, was the tombstone of an aristocrat whose potted obituary in my guidebook unforgettably declared him 'synonymous with murder, rape, incest, theft and treachery'. I'm thinking, of course, of Prince Michael of Kent. But I'm actually talking about Cesare Borgia.
    The Borgias were the Bond villains of Renaissance Europe, and Cesare was the Blofeld's Blofeld. But as well as being a vile and mercenary pan-Continental schemer, he was also, as you'd expect from the son of Pope Alexander VI, a hard-bastard one-man killing machine. At times the plotting must all have seemed a bit much: 'The French, fearing the Hapsburgs, allied with Fernando. The Italians, fearing both but detesting the Spanish even more, backed the Austrians.' And at such times, Cesare sought refuge in a more simple pleasure: taking on a large group of enemies and slaughtering them all single-handed.
    It was a hobby that reached its unfortunate apotheosis on 3 March 1507, when having failed to interest the citizens of Viana in joining him in an attack on the fortress headquarters of their besiegers, he set out to