By Fire, By Water (45 page)

“Better to have no power, and some security—or at least, an illusion of security.”

“What good is an illusion?” asked the fruit merchant’s daughter.

Santángel’s thirsty eyes drank in her presence: her black, sopping hair, her eyelashes, her lips, her clothes clinging to her body. Then he noticed it—the firm, well-defined roundness of her belly. She placed a hand on it.

His eyes rose to meet hers. He swallowed. Their regard communicated what their mouths could not.
Their
child. Together, half-deliberately, they had tied a knot.

“I’ve had time to think,” explained Santángel. “I’ve done a great deal of thinking. Praying. Remembering.” He glanced at the slate-gray sea. “I spent hours, calling up every detail.” He delicately ran his hand along the rim of her ear, down her cheek, under her jaw. “From the first words I heard you pronounce …”

She removed his hand from her face, but held his forearm. “What were they?”

“‘Allah alone conquers.’ The inscription on those beakers you made for the vizier.”

“Yes.” She nodded with a nostalgic smile. “Allah alone conquers. Even the most powerful of us, we have little control over our destiny.”

“Then our only choice is to embrace that destiny.”

“Embrace it? Look around, Chancellor. Look around.”

Exiles all around them, some emaciated from long travels, many filthy, tried to board ships, pleaded with sailors, appealed to authorities. As he observed all this despair, Luis de Santángel felt more powerless than ever. His mind reviewed his years in the royal court—the perfidy of some, the loyalty of others, the sacrifices, the battles, the triumphs, the fears, the losses. For what good?

“No, Chancellor. Our only choice,” said Judith, “is not to embrace our destiny in this world, but to hope for a better world.” Her eyes glided to the galleon behind him.

“Then I shall accompany you into that world.”

“And leave everything behind?”

He nodded slowly, his eyes boring into hers, expectant, tender, cautious.

“That is not possible.” And there was that sweet smile again. Except that now, Judith was weeping, her eyes pressed closed. He took her head to his shoulder until she swallowed and wiped away her tears. He caressed her shivering arms, her drenched back.

“I wish you well, Chancellor.” She tried to pull away, but he held tight. She forced herself out of his grip.

He frowned, uncomprehending. He searched her face.

“I’m glad you came here,” she finally offered. “I’ll feel better about the memory.”

“It needn’t be only a memory. Why?”

Behind him, Judith saw someone. She smiled.

Santángel turned to see a distinguished man, with a slight stoop and a close beard, emerge from the crowd.

“Ah, my beloved wife, there you are.”

She advanced toward the man. He kissed her forehead and stretched an arm around her shoulders to shelter her from the rain. He looked into her eyes. He observed Santángel. “Are we ready?” he asked Judith gently.

“Yes, Isaac. We are ready.” She glanced again at Santángel.

“Please,” the chancellor pleaded. “Please … contact me. At the court of Aragon. From wherever you should land.”

She cast her eyes downward to hide her tears. Holding Judith, the man led her toward the gangplank. As they departed, Judith did not turn around for one last look at Luis de Santángel, but Isaac Azoulay did. Neither man smiled, but they saw in each other a certain mutual understanding, a certain compassion. In that moment, when Luis de Santángel’s heart broke as he realized he had lost Judith irrevocably, he found reassurance. This dignified man in blue robes, whoever he was, would make a good father to his child. Judith would not have chosen him otherwise.

He stood on the wharf, the rain blinding him. He watched them ascend to the main deck of the galleon, which reminded him of the
Giustizia
and his trip from Rome with Cristóbal Colón, even if this more modest vessel was battered, its paint chipped and fading, its wet sails sagging.

Long after the talisman vendors, preachers, and guards went home, he stood there. Two longboats, each manned with ten oarsmen, slowly dragged the overcharged galleon to sea. Santángel searched for Judith in the multitude onboard, but could not recognize individual faces through the curtain of weather. He wondered whether she was peering back toward him.

He reflected that for the first time, sadly, he was without obligations or attachments. His son was gone; his staff dead and dispersed. When he had suggested to Judith that he would leave Spain with her, abandoning everything he possessed and everyone he knew, he had passed beyond a precipice he thought he would never approach. Now he stood on the other side, reflecting upon the ethereal threads that wove human souls together.

How far could those threads be stretched without breaking? Across seas and continents? Across the invisible boundary that separated the living from the dead? Could the waters between him and Judith wash away the empathy they had shared, the sense that in some incomprehensible way, despite their differences, they understood each other’s sorrows and dreams? Could the fields and mountains that separated him from Gabriel undo all they had lived through—the bedtime stories, the disagreements, the moments of frivolity? Could death obliterate the tower of memories he and Estefan had built, stone by stone, over the course of their lives?

He asked himself whether he was supposed to feel no responsibility for the child Judith carried; whether this world of impermanence, where the condition of an entire people could be reversed in a moment, was all there was; how he could return to the court of Zaragoza, and life as it had been, after all he had endured.

The ship of exiles vanished into the rain. Sea and sky merged into a solid sheet of gray. The gray darkened. Long after all the ships had sailed away, he remained standing on the shore, watching, steeling himself for his return.

    
CHAPTER TWENTY-FIVE

A
WEEK AFTER
J
UDITH’S DEPARTURE
, the chancellor met Cristóbal Colón at the gates of the Alhambra. His intent was to support the mariner’s project of exploration, but he secretly feared he no longer possessed the influence necessary to bring about a royal assent.

“Look,” burbled Colón, peering out over the city. “The rains, they’re ceasing. The clouds, they’re clearing. This day could not be more auspicious, Señor de Santángel. At long last, we’re about to witness the fulfillment of my destiny.”

“Perhaps,” said the chancellor. “But the king and queen don’t care about your destiny. What they care about is Christianizing millions of pagan souls. This will justify the massive theft they’ll authorize you to undertake on their behalf.”

Colón smiled. The courtier’s bitterness amused and saddened him.

The two waited more than an hour before meeting with the queen and Hernando de Talavera. The king was attending to other business, visibly keeping his distance from his chancellor.

Cristóbal Colón knelt before Queen Ysabel. He reminded her of her promise to reconsider his project following the conclusion of the war against Granada. She turned to the recently installed archbishop of Granada. “Father Talavera, have you had the opportunity to study Señor Colón’s proposal?”

“We have, Your Highness. And we have conferred with several of the greatest minds known to us—Diego de Deza, Rodrigo Maldonado, and others.”

Both Santángel and Colón knew of these men. They were luminaries of the ecclesiastical and political world the archbishop inhabited, but not the intellectual equals of the greatest living astronomers and cartographers, Abraham Zacuto, Joseph Vizinho, and Paolo Toscanelli—with all of whom Colón had consulted.

“We commend Señor Colón,” continued Talavera, “on his diligent work, assembling bits and pieces from sources as diverse as the pseudo-prophet Esdras, the itinerant merchant Marco Polo, whose writings have largely been discredited, and even certain ancient philosophers. What an exhaustive undertaking this must have been for a self-taught sailor.”

Luis de Santángel glanced at Colón. The Genoese refused to show any reaction. He was watching the monk’s lips, absorbing his every syllable as attentively as a bloodhound stalking its prey.

“However,” the archbishop continued, “all of us, without exception, have found Señor Colón’s calculations to be wanting in several respects, the most egregious of which concern his estimation of the circumference of our terrestrial globe. In this matter, we have inherited figures from Eratosthenes, Posidonius, and the Arab El-Ma’mun, who agree on a number several times larger than the one put forth in Señor Colón’s proposal.”

Colón could no longer contain himself. “Father, if I may, Posidonius, according to Strabo, estimates 180,000
stadia
—70,000 to the east, in the form of land, and 70,000 to the west, mostly water. Such a distance, it would certainly be navigable.”

Queen Ysabel held up her hand. “Please, señor, allow the archbishop to finish.”

For the first time, Talavera turned to face the captain. “Strabo, Señor Colón, is wrong. And by the way, 70,000 plus 70,000 do not add up to 180,000.”

Colón looked down, pursing his lips.

“But these are mere details.” Talavera turned back to the queen. “There is also the matter of Señor Colón’s compensation. He wishes to be named Admiral of the Ocean Sea and viceroy of all the islands and mainlands he might discover, titles that would make him and his heirs members of the noble class. He wishes to retain one-tenth of all wealth produced in any such lands—again, for him and his heirs, through all future generations. He makes other requests as well that we deem excessive, to say the least.”

The duke of Medina-Celi had encouraged Colón to demand these emoluments. “The more outrageous your request,” he had insisted, “the more seriously they’ll take you.” Now, in the light of Talavera’s withering critique, Colón wished he could forfeit them.

The queen looked at Talavera for another moment, as if digesting the full weight of his devastating judgment. She was about to turn to Colón, but he spoke first. Behind her shoulder, through a wide entranceway framed by ornate columns, what he saw took his breath away.

“Your Highness, my lady, please.” He pronounced these words in such a mellifluous voice, just the opposite of the tone she expected, that she took notice. Clawing the air, his palm facing upward, he waved her toward him.

“What on earth is the matter, Señor Colón?”

“Come.”

The queen glanced at Talavera, then at Luis de Santángel, and rose from her throne. She allowed the sailor to lead her out of the room, to a vantage point where they could see the city of Granada, wet with rain, shining in the bright sunlight, which streamed through holes between the dark clouds.

“Look.”

As Santángel and Talavera joined them on this portico, the queen’s eyes followed Cristóbal Colón’s fingertips all the way to the horizon. Rising out of the earth, far to the east, stretched the brightest, most color-saturated rainbow any of them had ever seen—climbing to the clouds, then falling toward the land, to the west.

“The struggles of our Mother Church, in Rome,” Colón muttered. “The war against the Jews. The sign of the covenant.”

Of those assembled, only Luis de Santángel understood.

“It is lovely,” Queen Ysabel replied in an equally calm, low voice. Something at once ingenuous and manic in this sailor’s deportment charmed her. “But the most beautiful rainbow in the world wouldn’t prove, as far as we can discern, that the Ocean Sea is smaller than Father Talavera says it is.”

“It is time.” Cristóbal Colón sighed.

Luis de Santángel, no less moved than his Genoese protégé, finally spoke up. He did not know exactly
why
he spoke up, but he knew it had something to do with the last words Colón had uttered, with paradise, with the fate of the Jews, with the destiny of the world, with the Book he had studied while detained. He felt as if a gaping hole had opened in the walls of his office in the royal palace of Zaragoza. He could see beyond the immediate interests of the king and the queen, beyond even his own life. He appreciated the zealous fantasies of a Colón or an Isaiah. The only hope, if there was any hope at all, lay beyond the known world. Its roots stretched deep into the soil of an ancient faith.