Spice and the Devil's Cave (2 page)

There was no one in the room who had forgotten that it was Diaz, himself, who had designed those ships and watched over their beginnings; but only he knew the bitterness of seeing those idle hulls and their half-finished rigging left to rot – for all Manoel seemed to care – in the dockyards.

“It always seemed to me,” Abel took him up, “that John got just what he deserved. Here, years ago, John Cabot came all the way from Venice to beg an outfit to discover a passage to India; the same thing happened again, in the case of Columbus, and John turned both of them away-deliberately lost two great chances for Portugal. Life doesn't go on holding the door open, you know. There comes a time when it slams it shut in your face!”

“But wouldn't you think,” Diaz demanded, “with Spain so keen over Columbus's two cruises that they're outfitting him for a third voyage, and news that the English Henry is getting John Cabot ready to find a sea passage, that Manoel would be afraid they'd find the way to the Indies first?”

The evening always finished that way: eager speculation, comment, mounting hopes, finally ending against the dead wall of Manoel's callousness to the big issue of the time.

Bartholomew Diaz pushed his chair back from the table, got up, said good night and went out. Gama soon followed, and only Ferdinand and Abel remained. In fact, it was the usual sequel of these meetings, that the boy would stay on to talk of the all-engrossing topic.

Abel studied him now, as Bartholomew Diaz had, earlier in the evening. But where Diaz had noted evidence of personal traits, Abel read evidence of the national character. The sturdy build, the air of ruthless determination coupled with a certain arrogance toward danger, all reflected, Abel said to himself, generations that had been trained on Portugal's littoral to the combat of the sea, or hardened in struggles with the Moors.

At this point in Abel's meditations, his wife, Ruth, came in with a dish of figs preserved in grape treacle from a famous recipe that she claimed came from Palestine. Ferdinand sprang up and greeted her with an affectionate little gesture. He'd been a favourite with Ruth ever since she had seen him as a toddling youngster, when she was visiting friends at Sabrosa, and he knew those figs had been brought in especially for him.

“Help yourself, child, they'll sweeten your dreams after all that dry talk,” she told him. “How you can spend so much time over those stupid old maps I can't see. Stuffy in here as a dungeon, too, with all you men hived up together!”

She pushed the map to one side of the table, set the dish at Ferdinand's hand, bustled across the room, and flung open the door into the garden-court.

Ruth was short and stout, with a way of trotting about as she talked, while she punctuated her remarks with little sidewise nods that reminded one of a bird cocking its head from side to side. Everything about her was intensely practical. When other women's skirts swept the ground, Ruth's neatly cleared, and homespun for every day but the Sabbath was, to her mind, wasteful and frivolous. She prided herself on a fresh muslin cap each morning as much as she did on her clean house and the trim flower beds. Her mind was as practical as her capable hands: anything, for instance, outside of established fact she treated as cobwebs or weeds, and neither Abel nor his friends were under any illusions as to her opinion of the discussions in his workshop.

“You'd stay here in this close air till you choked!” she scolded, as she sat down; then, “Aren't you going to sample my preserves?” she impatiently demanded, while she pulled at the girdle of her tight-fitting waist.

Abel reached over and helped himself to the confection, meditatively gazing into the darkness beyond the open door. Ferdinand, seething to continue the theme of the evening, watched the older man for a sign to begin.

“Well, Ferdinand, let's have it!” Abel finally said, his eyes twinkling.

“Yes, sir!” The boy's hand smote the table with a blow that made Ruth jump, and his sombre eyes blazed. “I can't get over it, Master Abel – the shame of it! Here's the merchantmen of Venice and Genoa bringing back the goods of the Orient, and trading with everybody all up and down both sides of the Mediterranean, their flags flying as complacent as you please, here in Lisbon harbour, as if they owned the place, while our ships sometimes – only sometimes, mind you-get left-over cargoes that no one else is keen about. Think of it – Portugal taking the leavings of Venice, by heaven! Why shouldn't
we
be bringing back the cargoes from the Orient? I don't mean by way of the Mediterranean, either!”

“I know, I know,” Abel nodded. “You mean direct from the Orient, around by the Devil's Cave.”

“Heavens, yes! Of course that's what I mean,” Ferdinand snapped out.
“Then
where'd Venice and Genoa be? And Spain and England?”

“I declare,” laughed Ruth, “I believe you'd like a chance to spite Spain and England!”

“Don't you think for a minute that they don't feel the same way about us!” the boy retorted. “Aren't they both doing their best to crowd us out of the race for India? And we could have been there before Spain ever thought of sending out Columbus, if we'd only followed Captain Diaz' lead! But now, Spain claims that Columbus has reached the Orient; by way of the west, to be sure, but still reached it.”

“There is no doubt Columbus has found something,” Abel said thoughtfully, “but whether it's the Orient, or even any part of the Orient – Look here, Ferdinand,” he broke in on himself, “you know, and I know, that those half-naked savages and those rude gewgaws that Columbus brought back don't tally with the great cities and the costly trade that men who've been in the Orient tell about – men like Marco Polo and his compatriots Conti, and Cabot, and even our own Covilham.”

“Well,” Ferdinand offered, “to do Columbus justice, all he claims is that what he's found is the undeveloped outskirts of Cipangu
³
or Cathay.
⁴
But if we could settle what we've all but proved,” he pursued, in a low, vehement voice, “if we could reach India by way of the Cape, then, Portugal – Lisbon –” He broke off, his face working.

“Lisbon would be,” Abel finished for him, “the port of entry to Europe of the Orient's trade. Lisbon would be – what Venice now is!”

“But if we lose,” the boy choked out, “if we lose, we'll have to stand by, while Spain, or London gets the trade. And yet, Manoel can't see it! The biggest chance the world has ever offered-and he letting it slip through his fingers!”

“Just listen to the child!” cried Ruth. “Breaking his heart over something he doesn't even know exists!”

“Don't say that!” Ferdinand said, sharply. “I'd – I'd – stake my soul that the Way of the Spices lies as plain as a road from us to India, just as Covilham says.” He turned almost pleadingly to Abel.
“You
believe that, Master Abel, don't you?”

As Abel started to speak, the two others saw his lips, even in the very act of forming an answer, freeze into stark amazement, his eyes focused on some object behind them.

With one impulse they whirled about to see, poised in the doorway, as if in arrested flight, a bare-legged, ragged figure. Out of the pallid face stared great, dark eyes dilated by a madness of fear that wiped out every other expression.

For an astounded moment Ferdinand waited for the apparition to vanish-as it had come-like a wraith. No! . . . That was
flesh
, human, alive, that quivered under the torn breeches, and that was blood on the thin hands – one could even see where it had stained the tattered coat. Just a poor, frightened lad, of perhaps his own age!

A chair scraped the floor – Ruth ran past him to the door, and drew the pitiful figure inside. All at once he heard her cry out, saw her draw back. He started forward – as suddenly halted. Had he seen – or imagined – two braids of long, dark hair tucked under the ragged coat?

“It's a girl, Abel – a
girl!”
Ruth was stammering.

At the sound of her voice the terror-stricken eyes glanced back into the court; then, like a wild creature seeking cover, the girl seized Ruth's hands and dragged her into the room beyond the workshop.

“Someone is hunting her!” Abel cried. “The door, Ferdinand-quick!”

Ferdinand was out of the room, across the court, and already turning the key in the outside gate, when Abel, coming up, a little out of breath, reached out and tried the heavy door. Too amazed to talk, they stood, looking at each other.

“You'd think,” Ferdinand said under his breath, “that we'd have heard her come in, or that someone would have seen her climbing the hill up here.”

“Suppose you'd gone away when the others did, and I'd locked the gate after you,” Abel meditated aloud, “where might this poor creature have wandered?”

“I'm glad I stayed,” Ferdinand said, soberly, falling into step with Abel who had begun to pace slowly up and down the court.

Without speaking, they walked its length and back. Unconsciously they muffled their steps on the stone flags, as though they listened for some clue from the night.

To Abel, the very garden about them was an expression of what was in their minds. The gray old fig tree, the laden damsons that his own hands had trained along the wall, even the beds of dew-sweet flowers seemed to listen, to wait ….

“Where in the world did that child come from?” he mused aloud.

“She might have been brought in on a slave ship,”

Ferdinand threw out at random. “But slaves are black as ebony,” he quickly amended, “and this girl has skin – well – like ivory, with sunlight striking across it.”

He was a little embarrassed at this lapse from his usual literal speech, but Abel seemed not to notice it.

“Exactly,” he rejoined, “like yellowed ivory, or like those lilies of mine in moonlight. However, that idea of yours is something to follow up. We can very soon find out at the docks whether any slave ship has put in here.”

From the court they could see Ruth's shadow moving about in the lighted room where the girl had fled. At last, the light went out, and Ruth appeared at the workshop door.

“She's quieted down a little,” she whispered, as Abel and Ferdinand stepped into the room.

“What does she say?” Abel eagerly demanded. “Did she tell you –”

“' Tell' me!” Ruth echoed with fine contempt. “I don't believe she can speak a word of our language. I tried to talk with her, but all she did was to huddle in a corner, and stare at me with those big, terrified eyes. She acts almost as if her brain was turned. But when I gave her some warm milk, she drank it like a kitten, and she let me bind up her poor hands.”

“Did you see how they'd bled over her coat?” Ferdinand broke in.

“It's clear enough that she's had a terrific fight to escape,” Abel thoughtfully observed.

Ferdinand got up to go. “I'll look around the docks tomorrow, and see what craft are in,” he said. “Perhaps I might pick up a clue about her.”

Ruth started up with an alarmed face. “But mind you don't do or say anything that'll rouse suspicion! Those she was running from must be lying in wait for her, right here in town, and if they should find her, it's my belief the child would die of fright.”

“Don't be afraid, Ruth,” Abel assured her, curiously touched by this new tenderness. “Not a soul outside of us three shall know she's here.”

“I'll keep my mouth shut,” Ferdinand declared, “and my ears and eyes open. No one shall drag a word out of me!”

“Right!” Abel took him up. “So it's just between ourselves to discover where she comes from.”

“Compared with which even finding the Way of the Spices might be simple!” Ferdinand laughed, as he took himself off.

¹
Magellan's birthplace, in Portugal's most northern province, Trazos-Montes.

²
A Venetian cartographer of the fifteenth century.

³
Japan.

⁴
China.

CHAPTER 2

Nicolo Conti

F
ROM
the rail of the Venetian merchantman, the
Venezia
, Nicolo Conti watched her crew send the last of the Lisbon consignment of sugar hurtling to the long quay. The
Venezia
had come in late the day before, and by the time she had made her way past Portuguese fishing boats and English vessels, Spanish galleons and Dutch, and found a berth between the craft tied up to the sea-wall, there had not been time to finish unloading. The crew now was hurrying, for they were already overdue, and it was nip and tuck to catch the flood tide over the bar.

Someone behind him spoke his name, and Nicolo turned to see a rugged figure coming toward him. “Got your luggage together, Conti? We're about ready to go.”

“It went ashore first thing this morning, Captain. All I've to do is to get myself ashore.”