The Seven Serpents Trilogy (10 page)

Captain Roa chewed the ends of his mustache and looked down at the deck. As he had before, at the time we ran low on water and he advised Don Luis that it was wise to return to the Canaries, he once more went against his better judgment. We had been saved then by great good fortune. I wondered if we would be saved again.

“We sail,” said the captain. “But the gold needs to be shifted. Here on deck it makes us top-heavy. In a wind we'll rock like a baby's cradle.”

Don Luis said, “I don't trust the crew to handle the treasure, even from here to the hold.”

“Nor I,” said the captain.

Guzmán had appeared and stood listening. He wore a bandage over one of his ears, a part of which had been severed but which Juan Pacheco, barber and sur geon, had restored.

“How the crew long to get their claws into it,” he said. “Sorry lot that they are. We'd be better off if they were ten fathoms under.”

“Where do we store the gold?” Don Luis asked.

“In the stable,” said the captain.

“Not with the horses.”

“With the savages.”

“Yes, let them sit on it. They can serve as watchmen.”

Now that the sun had risen and everyone was on deck, except the Indians, without much spirit I sang a morning song. Afterward, Don Luis asked me to go be low and repeat the song for the savages.

“Let them know,” he said, “that they have nothing to fear. In three days they shall be living on a beautiful is land. Give the mother comfort and her child this sweetmeat.” He drew forth from his doublet a hard, yellow confection and put it in my hand. “And you should take with you the picture of the Virgin Mother and Child. I noticed in the past when we first came to the island that the savages displayed great interest in the holy picture when you showed it to them.”

“I fear that now they'll show little interest,” I said. “If I were they, I wouldn't feel any. Therefore, I shall not take the picture. Nor will I make them promises about life on a beautiful island. But I will give the sweetmeat to the child, if you wish, and say it is from God. If I said it was a gift from you, the mother wouldn't allow her child to take it. For which I would not blame her.”

Don Luis brushed a mosquito from his sleeve. “You are very stiff necked about these slaves. I recall that you are an admirer of Las Casas. I've heard you speak of him. I believe he preached in our village church on one occasion. You took leave of school to attend.”

He waited for me to say something, and when I didn't, he went on.

“But I have never heard you mention the fact that this Las Casas, who is highly regarded by both Their Majesties and by the Church, proposed that Negroes be shipped from Africa to the Indies. It was his idea and it is now being carried out. They are captured in Africa by slave hunters, transported to Hispaniola, and sold here to the highest bidders for work on the farms.”

“I am aware of this,” I said. “Las Casas was wrong. What you are doing is wrong also. Enslaving the In dians. Taking gold that does not belong to you.”

Don Luis showed his teeth in a quick smile. “You were glad enough to take a share of the gold,” he taunted me.

“Not glad,” I said. “The gold you pressed upon me I threw away. It's now at the bottom of the sea.”

Don Luis was carrying his sword. It hadn't left his side since he came aboard yesterday. I am sure that last night he had slept with the sword. His hand settled upon the hilt. Our eyes met. I am certain from what I saw there that it took the whole of his will power not to slip the sword from its sheath and run me through.

“With your permission,” I said, being as respectful to him as to any of my elders, as I had been taught to be by a strict father, “I will go.”

I left him mumbling something or other about ingrat itude and went to gather up Esteban. I located him playing tarok, holding in one hand the last of his nuggets, and dragged him off to the companionway.

The verdant isle and its sheltering bay dropped astern. As we reached the hold, a slow, surging wave lifted the caravel and tilted her to starboard. She hung there, then timbers groaned as the old vessel righted herself, swung slowly to port, then little by little moved back to an even keel.

The hold smelled of sadness. The Indians were hud dled together, holding each other, sick. I felt sick myself.

 

W
HEN
E
STEBAN AND
I
LEFT THE HUDDLED
I
NDIANS, IN OUR SHORT
time away from the deck, the sky had changed color. The thin, white clouds that seemed driven by a high wind were now gray. While we stood at the head of the ladder, the gray deepened to black, the black be came a greenish blue. Night was close upon us.

Long, surging swells were moving in from south eastward, but the surface of the sea was unruffled and oily, like a vast dark stone. The air was still.

A lookout in the mainmast tower called down that he had raised two large islands. From the sterncastle, Cap tain Roa called back and asked where they lay.

“Off our starboard bow. Three degrees.”

“At what distance?”

“Four leagues, give or take.”

Whereupon Captain Roa instructed the helmsman to head the
Santa Margarita
south by southeastward. At the command, Don Luis hurried out of his quarters, wanting to know why our course had been changed.

Captain Roa said, “We are within an hour's sailing of likely islands. In that time we may well be in need of their shelter. The storm lies close at hand. Its portents increase by the moment.”

Don Luis glanced at the overcast sky, the calm, unruffled sea, the dolphin swimming just below the surface of the water—all the signs the captain had spoken of before—but again he stubbornly refused to heed them.

Señor Guzmán came from below, where he had talked to the crew. Speaking in his gentlest voice, which was only a tone less than a shout, he said to Don Luis, “The men are for putting in at the next island.”

“And what,” Don Luis asked, “has the crew to do with how we sail and where we sail?”

“Everything,” said Guzmán. “We are on a ship with a storm fast approaching.”

“Two days ago, the moment you learned that they had mutinied, you were of a mind to kill them all.”

“A mistake, sir.” Señor Guzmán never addressed Don Luis as
sir
except when he was angry. “A mis take which I regret.”

“It's also a mistake to allow them to run the ship,” said Don Luis.

The crew, those on watch and those who had been asleep or gambling, had gathered on the main deck, just below the sterncastle, where we stood. The men carried no weapons except their tough fists. At least none that I observed.

Don Luis glanced down at them and made a quick count, mumbling the numbers as he counted. There were nine men, with two missing. A dangerous lot, he must have thought, their appetite for gold only whetted by what he had given them, anxious for anything to happen. Even a shipwreck, so long as they would benefit.

His own small army of soldiers, cannoneers, bowmen, and musketeers were not in sight, but they weren't in hiding. They were loyal, he knew, and would support him with their weapons and their lives.

A gust of steaming air swept the deck; then came a short lull and in a moment or two a second gust, this one stronger and from a different direction.

Don Luis was silent, his hand on the hilt of his sword. He glanced at Señor Guzmán and Captain Roa, at the crew standing sullenly by the main-deck hatch. He started to speak and stopped, then asked the cabin boy to fetch Juan Pacheco.

Pacheco came running with comb and curling iron, thinking that his master's beard was in need of atten tion. But Don Luis sent him back for his astrological materials.

“Tell me,” Don Luis said, when Pacheco, barber, sur geon, reader of the heavens, returned with parchment, inkhorn, and quill, “what signs govern our fortune on this day in August in the land and on the seas of New Spain?”

“Be patient, Señor Don Luis,” said the barber, as if he were speaking to a child, in a tone his master would not countenance from anyone else, “and I will cast you a full and all-embracing chart.”

“It need not be all embracing,” Don Luis replied. “We lack time to embrace everything.”

The barber glanced in the direction of the sun, which was hidden behind a bank of clouds. He asked Captain Roa if he knew the day of the
Santa Margarita's
launching.

“The 21st of May,” said the captain. “In 1491. There's a plaque on board that gives that date and year.”

“At what hour?”

Captain Roa thought for a while and said that she had slipped down the ways exactly at noon, a detail he must have made up on the moment.

Pacheco mumbled something to himself, saying, “A happy placement of the planet Mercury.”

My grandfather, God elevate and preserve his soul, was devoted to the art of astrology, even though he was a devout man. In fact, the movements of planets, of the sun, moon, and the stars as they swung through the heavens controlled his earthly life from hour to hour and day to day.

If in the morning, having studied his charts, he found there to be danger connected with fire, he would not light the kitchen stove nor go near it. If the stars said that the day was poor for planting, he would remain in the house, far from the fields. Keen was his disappoint ment that I showed only a small interest in the subject.

Pacheco looked at the sky. A bluish green light sifted down from above, spreading over the sea and the ship and the faces of all the men. He paced back and forth, staring at the surging waves and lowering sky, at the slow rise and fall of the
Santa Margarita's
prow.

“Come,” he said. “The crew shows too much curios ity.” The barber, with his quill and inkhorn, started toward the cabin. When I didn't follow, Don Luis said to me, “You also, Julián.” He motioned Captain Roa and Guzmán away.

I went with the greatest of reluctance. The idea that these two men held in their hands the fate of the ship and of all our lives appalled me. That our fate could rest upon the movement of heavenly bodies and the barber's readings thereof was against all the teachings of the holy fathers in my seminary.

The cabin was in shadow. Little light came through the window, but that little had the same strange cast as the light that fell upon the sea and the ship.

From somewhere, Don Luis brought forth a small book bound in red leather and handed it over to Pacheco. In Arroyo the barber had a book of his own filled with astrological lore, a tome as big as a loaf of bread, which, when it was not in use, he wisely kept out of sight under a pile of moldy straw in the straw loft.

He now seated himself at the table, removed the stopper from the inkhorn, spread out a soiled square of parchment, and put down several notations, apparently the details that Captain Roa had just given him.

I had the impression as I stood watching Pacheco that he had done this many times during the voyage. It was probable that some or all of Don Luis's pig-headed deci sions had been based upon information Pacheco had drawn down from the starry skies.

As the barber continued with his writing, Don Luis grew impatient. He brushed me aside, went to the win dow, and glanced out, saying over his shoulder, “What do you find, not about me but about the
Santa Margarita
?”

“At this time,” said the barber, “you are the
Santa Margarita.
I am also. We all are. At this hour, ship and man share the same fate.”

“
Hombre
, this I know,” said Don Luis. “Don't be fancy with your readings. We lack time for fanciness; for quibbling, likewise.”

I went to the door and looked out. The ship had been moving on a light wind that came upon us in gusts. Now the wind had faded and the sails hung limp. I heard be neath me the groan of the heavy rudder, the creak of planks and oaken ribs.

Pacheco continued with his writing.

Don Luis left the window and, again brushing me aside, glanced out the door. “
¡Venga!
” he shouted. “Tell me what you see and do not put a pretty face on things.”

“I see,” said Juan Pacheco, barber, surgeon, astrolo ger, and soothsayer, “a long voyage for the
Santa Margarita
into uncharted waters, past many island empires, where gold abundantly exists, a voyage under fair skies and foul.”

“God's body!” exploded Don Luis. “Tell me what I have not already seen.”

Pacheco apparently did not hear him. He closed the book, glanced at his writings, and with bowed head spoke softly to himself in muffled words that sounded like an incantation. Don Luis stood over him, listening, his face colored by the strange light cast down from the skies.

I had never seen the devil before, in all my sixteen years, but for a moment I saw him then. He was standing there in place of Don Luis, bending over one of his infernal servants, listening to words that should not be spoken in the light of day.

“What do you want?” I cried. “Why am I here?”

Don Luis straightened up and looked at me as if he had forgotten that I was there in the cabin. He thought for a while. “You are here to intercede with God, to whom we shall commend our souls.”

The vision did not fade. The devil himself stood there. Pacheco's incantations went on. Then Don Luis told him to cease and turned to me with clasped hands and a pious gaze.

I backed away from him. “Pray for yourself!” I cried out. As I opened the door and slammed it shut, muffled sounds mocked me.

On deck Captain Roa gave orders to place all the ani mals in heavy rope slings lest the coming storm pound them to death. He called aloft and asked the lookout how far the islands' shelter lay. They were near, but in the black night that now descended upon us we some how passed them.

 

S
TEALTHILY, LIKE A HIGHWAYMAN IN THE DARK, THE HURRICANE FELL
upon us.