By Fire, By Water (2 page)

The pope coughed into his fist.

“Your Holiness,” resumed Santángel, “in Madrid, Segovia, and Cordoba, friends spy on friends, neighbors on neighbors, children on their parents. Even criminals lodge accusations.”

He paused to allow his translator to catch up.

“There’s no punishment,” pursued the chancellor, “despite the Ninth Commandment of our holy book, for bringing false accusations. If two men claim they heard another express heretical thoughts, that man’s conviction is assured. He’ll have to confess and pay penance, often everything he possesses, whether he be guilty or not. The man’s accusers will receive a portion of the spoils—a rich temptation, especially for criminals.”

He swallowed to slow his speech, but the rush of thoughts and emotions propelled him forward. “And even after the suspect confesses, it won’t be enough. He’ll have to name other secret heretics, whether or not he knows any.”

In the huge birdcage, one of the canaries warbled. The chancellor stopped. He had hardly begun to enumerate his grievances, but did not wish to tax his gracious listener.

When Colón, in turn, ceased speaking, the pope nodded. “I sympathize with your confusion and pain. But I’m not sure I fully understand your reasoning.”

“What can I clarify, Your Holiness?”

“Do you deny that we must fight to preserve the integrity of our faith? Or do you feel that every man should feel free to think and act as he wishes?”

Santángel stiffened. “That is not what I’m advocating.”

“Let me ask you a question. Are you, yourself, a
converso?”
The pope knew the Spanish term, which designated one whose parents or grandparents had abandoned the Jewish faith and embraced the faith of Christ, usually under duress.

“I am a Christian, Your Holiness.”

The pope nodded slightly. “And how did you come to work so closely with the king and queen, in the conjoined courts of Aragon and Castile?”

“My father was chief tax farmer of Valencia.” The chancellor spoke more cautiously. “Even as a boy, I was on familiar terms with royalty. Not only in Castile, but in Aragon as well. As you surely know, Holy Father, the project of marrying the realms of Castile and Aragon was the work of many minds.”

The pope’s lips curled into a half-repressed grin. “And now, you feel trapped, serving a regime whose interest—particularly, whose zeal to confiscate the property of rich
conversos
—no longer corresponds with yours.” Again, he coughed. His taster handed him a glass of almond liquor.

The pope resumed: “You can’t walk away from the coveted position you’ve created for yourself. You’d lose not only the power you wield over your subordinates, and perhaps a great deal of your wealth, but more importantly, you would lose your precious influence over the Crowns. Is that not so?”

Still kneeling, Santángel gripped the bedrail.

“You see,” added the pope, “in this corrupt world of ours, everyone must make compromises.” He glanced at his guards.

Appreciating the pope’s honesty, Santángel followed his eyes. The two guards turned. It was a cue whose meaning was not lost on the chancellor. “Holy Father, thank you for hearing me.”

From his pocket, he removed a leather box filled with gold coins. Upon the pope’s gesture, Santángel placed the box on the bedside table.

Though owned by the Church, Civitavecchia bustled as brassily as any other port town. Standing in the open doorways of their brick-and-stone two- and three-story homes, merchants called out their wares.

“Mussels, clams, sardines, still wiggling in their juices!”

“Candles for your bedside! Iron fixtures I have, hinges, rods, door locks!”

“From Perugia, the finest soap!”

“Hot brew, step inside! Come, come!”

In the heavy air, victuals, old urine, and spices blended into one pungent stench. Drunks loitered outside taverns. A child, brandishing a stick, chased a barking mutt down the street. Prostitutes in garish dresses competed for the gentleman’s eye. Santángel and Colón ignored them as they plodded toward the harbor.

“Are we ready to sail, then?”

“Just chasing a few stragglers,” replied the captain. “We’ll be off before long.”

“We haven’t got a full crew?”

“Don’t worry, Chancellor. These louts, when they’re not pouring ale down their gullets, they’re wasting their vigor in brothels. But we’ll find enough men. This town is full of sailors. They all get hungry sooner or later.”

At the end of a narrow, dark alley, the sky and sea opened before them like an immense gate. Galleys and caravels, encrusted with barnacles, rigged with blackened, swaying ropes, their sails yellow-brown and patched, clustered about the docks like pigs at a feeding trough. Carpenters, blacksmiths, and caulkers hammered and sawed on the worn bulwarks. Sailors hauled crates up long gangways. Gulls circled and called in the tar-scented morning air.

A square-rigged caravel had come in. Crewmen lowered its jib sail and reamed its scuppers, the drains that channeled water off the main deck. On the quay, a grizzled merchant-sailor harangued a motley crowd of shopkeepers, guildsmen, farmers, and loiterers. Portly, with tight leggings, a laced linen shirt that must once have looked extravagant, sagging jowls, and wet hair the hue of charred driftwood, he injected every word with a ragged, grim earnestness. His human cargo slouched and slumped behind him, a sorry assortment of outlanders exuding sweat, fear, and defiance, chained together at the ankles. Their bruises testified to a harrowing voyage.

As Santángel and Colón approached, the slave merchant pulled forward a captive. “This miscreant, his wife, poor thing, passed on during the crossing. What a feisty, wild animal she was. Her husband’s eyes, as you see, gentlemen, they’re still brimming with tears.”

The slave was a burly man with a thick moustache and curly, shoulder-length hair the color of mud. The raw, red stripes of a recent lashing streaked his chest and arms. He directed his murky regard somewhere in the distance.

“But his boy, here,” the merchant tugged a child forward, “not more than ten, and as pliant as clay. He’ll grow big, like his father. Raise him right, you’ll have a sturdy laborer.”

The boy’s father drew his son to his chest, shouting something incomprehensible. The crowd answered with hoots, yelps, and laughter. Luis de Santángel found no humor in it. He, too, had lost his wife and had been left raising a son alone.

“Six silver lire,” a man in a hair tunic called to the slave merchant.

The merchant ignored this insulting offer. “Let me tell you another secret about this fellow. We put him to work on our caravel. Yes, we did.” He turned to a member of his crew. “How good a sailor was he, Giovanni?”

The sailor spat and answered, “Real good.”

The child was now sobbing, his bare stomach contracting in spasms.

“Why don’t we bid on them?” Santángel asked Colón. “We need sailors, don’t we? The boy can be our steward. Purchase them both.”

Colón called out an offer. Others began increasing their bids. In the end, Colón won the father and the boy. The price Santángel paid for them, the captain found not merely excessive but outrageous. How any man could blithely cast away so many of the same gold pieces that Colón labored and sweated endlessly for, on stormy seas and in freezing ports, he could not fathom. Luis de Santángel, the royal chancellor of Aragon, was reputed to be astute, haughty, and guileful; but these epithets, Colón sensed, hardly sufficed to define him.

Santángel’s eyes drank in the immensity of the
Giustizia
, a resplendent man-of-war, a hundred and thirty feet long, twenty-eight across, its carved hull painted in ocher and gold leaf, radiant under the cobalt sky. For Santángel, the procurement of this warship represented a triumph. With Colón’s assistance, he had transformed a perilous investment, silver and ivory from the Southern Continent, into a windfall not only for himself, but also for the Crown of Aragon.

“All fitted-out to meet your king’s desires.” Colón stopped, pulled tight the cord around his linen smock, and corrected himself: “
Our
king’s desires.”

At present, Colón was living in Lisbon, where his brother was a mapmaker, but he intended to resettle in Spain. He wanted those close to the king and queen, and especially Santángel, to think of him as a Spaniard.

Santángel stepped back to view the ship better. He ran his palm over his cheek. “She is splendid.”

“Let me show you.” Placing a hand on Santángel’s back, Colón guided him to the main deck, past rope cages that held pigs, chicken, and sheep. He led him up narrow stairwells to the forecastle and the poop castle, fitted with swivel guns and cannons. He escorted Santángel down to the galley and the hold, where barrels stacked three-high contained gunpowder and ammunition, extra sails, pickled beef, olive oil, diluted wine, and fresh water. He ushered Santángel into a small room below the gun deck all the way aft, dimly lit through a narrow, rectangular porthole.

“A stateroom to yourself, Chancellor.”

The chancellor grabbed hold of a post, adjusting to the ship’s slow up-and-down motion, and glanced about the tight, oaken chamber. Tar-filled floor planks, a hay mattress, covered with a dusky linen cloth, two candles in a wrought-iron lantern. “And the sailors, where do they sleep?”

“On the deck, in the hold, anywhere. If they can’t find a spot, they stay awake. Most likely, they’ll keep you awake, too, with their shouting, their singing, their quarrels. A bunch of brawlers, the lot of them. Some wine?”

“Please.”

Colón had taken the trouble to place a ceramic decanter and two tin cups on the writing table. He filled one and handed it to Santángel. “To the
Giustizia
, and to the holy war against Granada, which she’ll help win for our king and queen.”

That night, as the
Giustizia
groaned and swayed, the two men slid roughly carved knights and pawns across the crude squares of a chessboard painted on the lid of Colón’s trunk. Being the more voluble of the two, the captain entertained the man who controlled King Fernando’s finances, relating tales of trading and the sea.

“Near Lisbon, pirates attacked us,” he reminisced. “They set my ship ablaze. I had to swim ashore. Lost everything. Had to start all over in a foreign land. To learn a new language. To scrabble for bread.” He sipped his wine. “Eventually, I befriended a cartographer close to the court. My brother now works for him. I’ve stayed in Lisbon six years, now. More than ready for another move.”

“Where will you go?”

“Andalusia. Medina-Celi and I, we have plans.”

Santángel nodded. His sometime business associate Luis de la Cerda, the duke of Medina-Celi, owned a shipping enterprise near Cadiz. He had helped finance the
Giustizia
and had introduced the chancellor to Colón.

“I married the most beautiful, loving woman in existence,” resumed the captain. “To believe in a hapless dreamer like me, she had to be an angel sent by God. She died. You, too, lost your wife, did you not, Chancellor?”

“Yes.” Santángel glanced into Colón’s pearly eyes. “I only regret God didn’t give me more time with her.” He remembered his departed wife’s laugh, her lively voice, her love for their son, whom she had carried with so much pain and whom she had held only once.