There was only a murmur in reply, and a shuffling of feet. Rich’s mind was already deeply engaged upon a legal analysis of the treaty he had just heard read, and the others were too stunned to speak.
‘Would any of you gentlemen care to comment?’ asked the Adelantado, but the Admiral spoke before anyone else could open his mouth.
‘I will not have the matter discussed,’ he said. ‘This treaty is your Viceroy’s decision, and it would be treason to question it.’
The Admiral sat in his chair, with his hands on his thin knees. He had spoken with an old man’s querulousness, and yet-and yet-there was a suspicion of triumph in his glance, a self-satisfied gleam in the blue eyes. It was as if he thought he had done something clever, hard though that was to believe. Rich remembered earlier discussions. Perhaps the Admiral had decided that to retain his power he needed to create some new party for himself which he could play off against the Adelantado’s brutal bullying, or against Rich’s vague powers. Or possibly he wanted to send a despatch to Spain saying that he had arrived to find the island in disorder, and had dissipated the disorder immediately by a few judicious concessions. Or perhaps he knew he had been weak and would not admit it. Or-anything was possible-he might by now have deluded himself into thinking that he had brought off a really creditable coup, just as he believed he had discovered the mines of Ophir and the Earthly Paradise. Meanwhile, Rich saw various loopholes of escape from this treaty.
‘Your Excellency signed of your own free will?’ he asked. ‘You were not coerced into it?’
‘Of course not,’ said the Admiral, indignantly.
‘A promise entered into under compulsion is not binding, Your Excellency,’ persisted Rich.
‘I know that.’
‘And these gifts of land, Your Excellency. Land is a tricky thing to deed away. It is Crown property. I doubt--please pardon me, Your Excellency, but of course we are all anxious to have everything as legal as possible-if Your Excellency’s Viceregal authority entitles you to dispose of the property of the Crown. The recipients would be well advised to have their title confirmed by Their Highnesses, and until Their Highnesses have given that confirmation I myself, for one, would be chary of entering into any dealings regarding those properties.’
‘My agreement with Their Highnesses gives me full powers.’
‘Powers can only be expressly given, Your Excellency. Any powers not named are by every rule of law retained by Their Highnesses.’
‘Oh, why split these hairs?’ broke in the Adelantado. ‘Their Highnesses are two thousand leagues from here, the treaty is signed, and there’s an end of it for a year or so. Roldan and his men will have the land if anything my brother can do can ensure it. There is no profit in continuing this debate, I fancy, gentlemen.’
Rich was of the same opinion. He escaped from the room as soon as he could and went to sit in the tiny apartment which he shared with Antonio Spallanzani. The Holy Name and the Santa Anna would be sailing soon, and his report must go in one ship while he sailed in the other. He thought longingly of Spain, of his cool stone house and fountain in the courtyard, the while he sat sweating and fighting the flies. It would be a long voyage home reaching far to the northward to avoid the path of the eternal easterly breezes, but in three months at most he would be in Spain. The King would be at Valladolid or Toledo, and he might be kept cooling his heels round the court for weeks. But six months at most, and he would be home again, in his own house, leading a decent and orderly life. He could sit in his big leather chair reading through the pleadings of law-abiding merchants, or, with a hushed band of students behind him, he could issue his judgments, in stately Latin, to the expectant litigants assembled in his hall.
That was the world he knew and loved, not this mad new world of rain and mosquitoes, of slaughter and mutiny, of mad theories and madder politics. And yet mad though it all was, he was conscious of a queer regret that he was leaving it. He would have liked to have stayed a while longer, even though he knew that he would be bitterly disappointed if some unforeseen circumstance compelled him to stay. He told himself that he was as mad as everyone else in Espanola.
Meanwhile the report had to be written, and he had to make up his mind what to write. As he re-pointed his pen he began to form phrases in his mind. He did not want to word them too strongly-the contents of the report would need no emphasis of phrasing.
19
Roldan and his followers had come to San Domingo under the protection of the free pardon which had been solemnly proclaimed at the foot of the flagstaff. They were swaggering about the place, Roldan and Bernardo de Tarpia and Cristobal Garcia and of all them. They had brought a long train of Indian slaves with them, well set up and handsome young women, each bearing burdens. Slaves and burdens, in accordance with the recent treaty, were to be sent to Spain in the Holy Name; the crop-eared Martinez was to sail with them as agent for all the recent mutineers, and he was to be armed with a long list of the luxuries which he was to buy with the proceeds of this plunder.
Rich’s report was completed, signed and sealed. Rich had given it with his own hands to Ballester, who was sailing as captain in the Santa Anna. The action had reminded him-if reminding was needed-of the impermanence of life in this world. He was taking the precaution lest the Holy Name with him on board should never reach Spain at all. Perhaps the next week would find him with the saints in Paradise, or suffering the pangs of Purgatory, or-he felt a shudder of fear-more likely cast into the eternal flames of Hell as a result of his recent heretical thoughts. He was in a state of profound dejection and agitation of mind which was not relieved in the least by the suspicious glance which Ballester darted at him when he received the letter; Ballester could suspect only too well what the contents were, and Ballester was one of those who loved the Admiral.
Should anyone of the Admiral’s party come to know exactly what was written in his report, Rich knew that his life might be in danger. There were subtle poisons in this island--the deadly manchineel was one--even if it would not be a more simple matter of a knife in his back. He had to set himself for these last few days before the ships sailed to play the part of the conscientious supporter, critical but not too much so-certainly not the man who would write to the King that the Admiral was not fit to govern a farmyard, let alone an empire. It was a comfort to him now that Roldan knew of the letter. Certainly neither the Admiral nor Ballester would dare to incur the penalties of high treason by tampering with a sealed document addressed to His Highness himself-at least, not while an enemy knew that such a letter existed. Rich could not trust either the Italians or the Andalusians, and he waited with impatience during the interminable delays in fitting out the Holy Name.
He was walking back in the dark after dining with the Adelantado. The Santa Anna had actually sailed with his report on board; the Holy Name was almost ready; another thirty-six hours and he would have seen the last of this island. Overhead the stars were brilliant; the moon would rise soon in all her splendour. The cicadas were singing wildly all round him, and the lusty croaking of the frogs in the stream supplied a cheerful bass. Fireflies were lighting and relighting their lamps about his path, far more brilliant and mysterious than their duller brothers of Spain. Altogether he was in a cheerful mood-two cups of the Admiral’s wine may have had something to do with that.
A denser shadow appeared in the darkness close at his right hand, and then another at his left. There was a man at either elbow walking silently in step with him; Rich felt the skin creep on the back of his neck, while between his shoulder blades he felt the actual spot where the stiletto would enter. Yet even in that moment he found time to wonder why they were troubling to murder him while his report was on its way to the King and beyond recall.
And then the walking shadow on his right spoke to him with the voice of Garcia.
‘Don Narciso,’ he said, ‘I must trouble you to turn back and come with us.’
‘And if I do not, Don Cristobal?’
Both men
pressed in close upon him, forcing his elbows against his sides.
‘I have a dagger here, Don Narciso. I will use it if you cry out.’
‘And I have another,’ said the voice of Diego Moret on his left. ‘And I will use it, too. There will be one in your back and one in your belly.’
‘Turn back with us, Don Narciso,’ said Garcia, insinuatingly.
Rich turned; he felt there was nothing else he could do.
‘Where are you taking me?’ he asked; he had to try hard to keep the quaver out of his voice.
‘This is not the time for explanations,’ said Garcia, grimly. ‘I would prefer you to keep quiet.’
They were walking down the slope from the citadel; the little town lay on their right, and there was only one solitary gleam of light from it. Rich decided they were going to lead him into the forest and kill him there. His body might lie for ever in that tangle of vegetation and never be discovered, even within a mile of the place. But he was still puzzled as to the motive, so puzzled that quite involuntarily he broke the silence with another question.
‘What do you want to kill me for?’ he asked.
‘Be quiet. And we are not going to kill you,’ said Garcia.
‘Probably not going to,’ amended Moret in the darkness on his left.
Even with this amendment the statement was reassuring. The wave of relief which surged over Rich astonished him; he realized that he had been far more afraid than he suspected at the time. He trembled a little with the reaction, and then battled with himself to stop it. He did not want these two men at his elbows to know he was trembling. They were coming nearer to the trees and the forest.
‘There are four horses here, Don Narciso,’ said Garcia. ‘One of them is for you. The others are for Don Diego and myself and Don Ramon who is waiting for us. There will be no reins for you to hold-the reins will be in my charge. But I hope you can stay in the saddle by holding on to the saddle bow.’
‘I can try,’ said Rich-the whinny of a horse told that they were drawing near to them.
‘Did you find him?’ asked an unknown voice.
‘Yes,’ said Garcia, and then to Rich: ‘Mount.’
Rich felt in the darkness for the stirrup, and with the effort usual to him he hoisted up his foot and got it in. By the time he had swung himself into the saddle Moret was already mounted; Garcia sprang into the saddle of the third horse. They began to move along a path; the unknown Ramon who had been waiting with the horses in front, followed by Rich and Garcia, while Moret brought up the rear. The horses blundered along in the darkness; Rich felt his face whipped painfully occasionally by branches, and his knees received several excruciating knocks. For a space his mind was too much occupied with these troubles, and with the necessity of keeping his seat in the saddle, to have any thoughts to spare for the future, but as soon as the forest began to thin, and the rising moon gave them light to an extent quite remarkable compared with the previous blackness, he inevitably began to wonder once more. Suddenly a new aspect of the situation broke upon him, with a shock which made him sweat and set him moving restlessly in the saddle.
‘Mother of God!’ he said. ‘The Holy Name sails tomorrow. You will let me get back in time to sail in her?’
The first reply he had was a light-hearted chuckle from Moret behind; the question seemed to amuse him immensely. Garcia allowed a painful second or two to elapse before answering.
‘No, my pretty one,’ he said. ‘You will not be sailing in the Holy Name. Rest assured about that.’ Assured was not at all the right adjective to describe Rich’s mental condition. There was bitter disappointment at the thought of not returning to Spain, but his other doubts overlaid that at the moment; he was intensely puzzled. It could hardly be ransom that these kidnappers were seeking; they must know that in the island he possessed practically nothing that anyone could desire. Then it occurred to him that perhaps he was being carried off to give legal colour to some plan they had in mind. They might be intending to force him to construct some binding agreement regarding their grants of land.
‘I will do nothing,’ he announced, stoutly, ‘to distort the law for you. I have my professional honour to consider.’
Moret seemed to find this announcement extremely funny, too. He broke into high-pitched laughter again; Rich, who could not see him, could imagine him writhing convulsed with merriment in his saddle.
‘Be damned to your professional honour,’ said Garcia. ‘Do you think a man like me needs a lawyer to chop straws for him in this island?’
‘Then why, in the name of God--?’
They wanted neither his wealth nor his legal services, and he could think of nothing else they could want of him. Unless perhaps-it was a most uncomfortable thought-they wanted him as a hostage. If that were the case his doom was certain; nobody of the Admiral’s party would lift a finger to save him. The sweat on his face suddenly cold, and he shuddered in the warm light.
‘We want you--’ began Garcia, slowly.
‘It’s too good a joke to spoil yet,’ interjected Moret, but Garcia ignored him.
‘We want you as a navigator,’ said Garcia.
‘As a navigator?’
‘Didn’t you hear what I said?’ snapped Garcia.
‘But I’m no navigator,’ protested Rich. ‘I know nothing about it.’
‘We saw you on the voyage out,’ said Garcia. ‘The Admiral was giving you lessons. You looked at the sun every day through his astrolabe, and at the stars each night. You were enough of a navigator to lecture us about it. Or have you forgotten?’
Rich certainly had forgotten until he was reminded of it.
‘But I could no more take a ship to Spain--’ he began.
‘Spain? Who said anything about Spain? It’s West we sail, not East. And I’ll warrant you could find your way to Spain, too.’
‘Holy Mary!’ said Rich faintly. ‘Sainted Narciso of Gerona!’
He was too stunned for a space to say more, but slowly realization came to him.
‘I will not go with you,’ he burst out. ‘I will not. Let me go back. Please. I beg of you.’
He writhed about in his saddle, entertaining some frantic notion of flinging himself to the ground and taking to his heels. The sound of a sharp whirr of steel behind him made him refrain; Moret had drawn his sword and was ready to cut him down. He forced himself to sit still, and from that he proceeded to force himself to appear calm. He was suddenly ashamed of his exhibition of weakness; it was especially shameful that he should have been guilty of an undignified outburst before men like Garcia and Moret, whom he despised. And-such is human nature-there was the faint hope growing in his breast already that he might yet escape.
‘What is the plan?’ he asked, steadying his voice.
‘A week back,’ said Garcia, ‘we caught an Indian. He is not of this island, although our Indians can understand him. He is taller and stronger, and his lower lip has been cut off in a V, so that we call him el Baboso, the slobberer.’
‘But what has he to say?’
‘He has told us of a land to the north and west, a vast country full of gold. Gold vases and gold dishes. There are vast palaces, he says, reaching to the sky, and the chiefs have their clothes sewn all over with precious stones so that in the sunshine the eye cannot bear their brightness. That is where we are going. We shall bury our arms elbow deep in gold dust.’
‘But in what ship?’
‘The caravel Santa Engracia lies less than twenty leagues from here. Her captain is dead of fever, and her crew tried to run off, but we have caught four sailors who can work the sails, and now we have you to navigate her.’
‘My God!’ said Rich. ‘I suppose Roldan is captain?’
Moret giggled again behind him.
‘Roldan? Good God, no! Who would want to sail under that lout? It is I who am captain, as you will do well to remember in future. We are twenty gentlemen of coat armour, and we shall carve out our own empire in the west.’
The firs
t thought that came up in Rich’s mind as he considered all these amazing statements was that the whole expedition was grossly illegal. Only the Admiral or those licensed by him had any right to explore the Indies; anyone else who should do so offended against not merely the Admiral but against the Crown. The gallows and the block awaited such offenders on their return. But a resounding success and a prodigious treasure might avert the penalty.
The immediate reaction to that notion was one of wonder at the incredible hardihood or rashness of those who had conceived the notion. Twenty gentlemen of coat armour, forsooth, with four sailors and a lawyer, were presuming to sail in a ridiculous caravel to ‘carve out an empire’ in a land wealthy enough to build palaces reaching to the sky. It would be a very different matter from the conquest of the helpless and lovable Indians of Espanola.
But this story told by the Slobberer with the missing lower lip had a chance of being true. It sounded a more likely tale than any Rich had yet heard; the facts that the Slobberer was of a different breed, and that he was mutilated in a fashion unknown in these islands, constituted valuable evidence that his story was not like the wild tales which the Admiral had first gathered, of Cibao with its golden mountains and of the valley of emeralds. The Slobberer might have some authentic knowledge of a real kingdom which certainly ought to be found in a north-westerly direction; if not the kingdom of the Grand Cham, then at least a dependency of it.
For a moment Rich felt a sensation almost of pleasurable excitement at the thought of such an adventure. He had to catch himself up suddenly and bring down his thoughts to a matter-of-fact level. How could he possibly navigate a ship from Espanola to China or Cipangu? Perhaps, as Garcia had in mind, the sailors would know how to trim the sails and attend to the other details of the practical handling of the ship. Perhaps he himself was capable of estimating the speed of the ship, and with the needle he would know something of her course. The astrolabe would give him a notion of their position relative to the equinoctial line; he raked back in his memory to see what he knew of the Admiral’s table of the sun’s height above the horizon-he could at least make a rough allowance for its variation, or perhaps there was a copy of the table on board the Santa Engracia. That would be a check on the other calculation, and would help him in the matter of allowing for currents and leeway and the uncertainty of the needle. Vaguely, very vaguely, he would have some sort of notion as to where they were. He could never hope to find his way back to Espanola if they wanted to return, but he could at least turn the ship’s head and sail her eastward-eastward-eastward until he had found Africa or Spain or Portugal or France or even England. The Old World was too big a place even for him to miss.
The Earthly Paradise Page 19