“Then why did you cut the anchor cables?”
He shrugged. “Maybe I like Espinosa. Maybe someday I will also become a marine.”
“What about Cartagena? You like him, too, don’t you?”
Suddenly Rodrigo shoved me to the deck. “Do you have to ask so many stupid questions?” he yelled. Then Rodrigo’s face turned strange. I was dumbfounded when his lips trembled and his eyes blinked back tears. “They were going to sink the Trinidad. I didn’t want them to kill you.”
I could only stare at him.
Then he punched me in the stomach. I doubled in pain, gasping. “I didn’t want them to kill you, because that’s my job.” He laughed as he fell on me, pounding my ribs.
Birds squawked and circled above us. Again the ships’ companies gathered onshore. Again the wind. The cheerless gray of clouds. The never-ending howling as if we were surrounded by demons.
It was the seventh day of April. On this day Quesada was appointed to die. Four days ago there convened a court-martial. Even the dead Mendoza attended. Propped in his bloodstained armor as if he were yet alive, Mendoza was charged with mutiny alongside his fellow conspirators, forty in all.
All were condemned to death. Mendoza’s body was dragged away, beheaded, and quartered. Dismembered parts of his body were suspended from a gibbet, a grisly reminder.
Then the sentence was appealed. It was argued that the ships’ companies could not afford such grave loss of life. One of the ships would have to be scuttled. More discussions followed. Punish them harshly, some said, a punishment they will never forget, but do not kill them. Kill only half of them, others argued, and the survivors will dare not rise in rebellion again. Even that loss of life, it was decided, was too costly.
Then Magallanes raised his hand for silence. “The judgment is to be amended,” he said. “Only Quesada will be executed. It was he who stabbed the master.”
Finally, on this day, we watched in silence as Quesada crossed himself and knelt in the sand, placing his head on the executioner’s block. He moved his mane of hair to one side with trembling fingers, exposing his pale neck. Then with a flash of light the ax fell. Quesada’s head rolled to the sand, his alabaster hair soaked with blood.
Those guilty of mutiny began the hateful task of careening the ships with their ankles wrapped in chains, all except Cartagena. He was imprisoned in his cabin, for Magallanes dared not allow him access to the ears of so many men, even if those men wore iron shackles. The rest of us began to build barracks and storerooms on a small islet in the bay.
There was one good thing about the mutiny. Minchaca, the marine who had wanted to hurt Aysó, who had then beaten me, was one of the mutineers. Now it was he who was chained. It was he who would suffer. “Who does Magallanes punish now?” I hissed at him one day as he shuffled past me, chains clinking. “Traitor!”
Minchaca stopped and turned. His face looked blank, as if he couldn’t remember me. “Dog-Boy?”
I licked my lips, unsure. It had not occurred to me that he wouldn’t remember who I was. “Aye,” I said.
He said nothing and shuffled on, leaving me standing, reddened with stupidity.
There was an abundance of wood—battered timbers from the ships and a kind of stunted, withered tree that grew on the lower slopes. Immediately we began chopping down trees, sawing, hammering, and drilling. It took us two weeks to build enough barracks and another few days to outfit them with supplies.
Then it snowed and turned bitterly cold. We huddled around the fires in the barracks, the breath of each man clouded with frost, praying for spring to hurry. Cold as it was, the chore of careening the ships remained for those in chains. Come high tide, the convicts floated each ship onto the beach, mooring her fore and aft. Chains clanked as they unloaded cargo and supplies and ballast and shifted the cannon to larboard. As the tide ebbed, the ship rolled on her larboard side, groaning and sighing, weary as an old woman about to sit upon a chair.
During our journey, a mass of sea life had settled upon the ships’ hulls, growing with fingers and tentacles that devoured the wood. Barnacles. Stinking seaweed. Such an abundance of colors —greens, reds, yellows, pinks—soft fleshy creatures and those hard as nuts. If unchecked, the marine growth on a ship’s hull became an island in itself, thicker than a man was tall, making the ship unwieldy, likely to founder and sink.
The crew of convicts scraped the hulls and replaced battered timbers. They caulked and painted and poured hot tar over both new and old timbers to kill the woodworm and protect the wood. Always the air stank of boiling tar, of smoke from the forge, of tallow, of oakum. The air hissed of bellows, clanged with the banging of iron, buzzed with the hum of saws. The men removed the tattered sails, then scrubbed and mended them. They pumped out the revolting bilges, crawling inside to scour them—a task despised. Then they rolled the ship on her starboard side and began again.
During this period, Cartagena somehow escaped. He went from man to man, desperate, whispering in each ear how Magallanes was mad and how they were all going to die unless something was done, to join with him now, before it was too late. Everyone turned away from him, pretending they hadn’t heard, their ears waxed cold. Rodrigo swore it was true, for Cartagena had whispered in his ear, too. Rodrigo told me, “But to join with him now would be suicide.”
Cartagena then sat in the shadow of the gibbet. I was gathering wood nearby. Mendoza’s and Quesada’s severed bodies swayed above him, creaking. And while I watched, he placed their stiffened hands on his cheeks and promised to fulfill their vow. Then he wept. It sounded like paper rubbed together—dry and parched.
It was there by the gibbet that he was arrested. Four marines marched toward him, weapons drawn, their breastplates as gray as the clouds. He did not resist, instead going limp, his boots scraping over the pebbles of the beach as the marines dragged him away. Standing with my load of wood, I searched my heart for my hatred, surprised to find only pity.
The next day another court-martial was held. Into the roaring wind and stinging sleet, and before all the ships’ companies, the sentence was announced. Cartagena was to be left behind when the fleet set sail. Marooned.
With that lonely word whispering in our ears, we were dismissed. As we walked away, Rodrigo said, “Pah! The captain-general’s backbone is limp as a rag. Even now he cannot bring himself to slay the son of a bishop.”
I said nothing, wiping the sleet from my eyes. The wind swirled around me, and I pulled my coat close. My teeth ached with cold. The very cliffs howled in torment, singing ghostly songs that promised naught but death. Nothing could be worse than being marooned in this desolate, godforsaken place. Not even Cartagena deserved such a fate.
Hunting, fishing, trapping, and preparing food for storage now consumed our days. Rodrigo and I went with Espinosa to the offshore islands where the black-and-white geese lived. They were easy to kill. A swift blow over the head brought them down. Back at the barracks, we smoked and salted their meat, storing it in casks. We melted their blubber for lamp oil. We scraped their hides and sewed clothing—boots, hats, coats, even rugs for the barracks floor. But within a week our new clothes began to reek, turning stiff and rotten. We wore them anyway.
On the plains high above the cliffs, we found a strange animal with the neck and body of a camel, the head and ears of a mule, and the tail of a horse. These we killed with crossbows. When I washed the blood and salt from my hands, I drew one into my sketchbook so I would not forget what they looked like. The pelts were even finer than that of the seawolf.
Mussels and crabs grew in the muddy bottoms near the shore. We roasted them and ate them while they were still hot, burning our fingers and throats. Wildfowl were tricky to kill. Rodrigo was expert at bringing them down with a stick thrown through the air. When they fell, stunned, we clubbed them to death.
One day the pimply-faced boy, the master’s lover, walked from our islet into the sea. Over the roar of the wind I begged him to return, but he did not look back. W
hile I watched, the waters lapped over his head and he disappeared. I stood there for an hour. My teeth chattering. My heart hollow. Praying for forgiveness. But I felt nothing, heard nothing but the endless, bone-numbing wind.
Not long after, a blizzard pounded us with its fist, furious and raw. No one could go outside, not even the men in chains. Men lay about on their furs, sewing pelts, occasionally stoking the fires, wondering why spring continued to hide her face. After all, it was May.
As I sat upon my bedding, drawing in my sketchbook, the fleet’s astrologer said something that caused all to sink into silence, punched in the stomach with despair.
“I believe I know why the weather worsens and the days become shorter.” I stopped to stare for his voice was grave. “Just as the stars are different in the Northern Hemisphere, so also are the seasons. When it is winter in the Northern Hemisphere, it is summer here. When it is winter here, it is summer there.”
“What are you saying?” someone cried.
“Today is the twenty-eighth day of May. If we were in Spain, summer would soon begin with the solstice in June. But here in the Southern Hemisphere, June heralds the start of winter. That is why the days have become shorter.”
A profound sense of nothingness pierced me. It cannot be. Beneath my furs, where none could hear me, I wept. Shuddering sobs, like none I had wept before.
Winter.
It had just begun.
XV
May 28–August 24, 1520
“. . . and through the wind and waves he rowed. Rowing, rowing, until his muscles screamed and he overtook the junk. He boarded it and single-handedly defeated fifty of the Chinese—”
“You are making this up,” interrupted Rodrigo. “No man could defeat fifty men by himself.”
“I swear it upon my soul,” said Gutiérrez, a cabin boy younger than I. “No doubt the captain-general wore full armor.”
“If he wore full armor, then he could not have rowed like a madman through such weather.”
“May the earth swallow me whole if this be a lie.” Gutiérrez paused, as if waiting to see if he spoke the truth. “Then, after all the Chinese lay dead, he rescued his friends from their prison below deck and from then on they sailed the junk.”
Rodrigo spat. “Tales.”
Gutiérrez turned to me. “You believe me, don’t you, Mateo?”
When I started to answer, Espinosa spoke from behind me. I had not even known he was there. “Your tale is a little stretched, but it makes for fine listening.” He moved to sit beside me on my bedding. “The captain-general is a brave and good man. He has done many miraculous things in his life. There was the time when, as a young officer, he was shipwrecked with the ship’s company on an atoll. They had only a few small boats, skiffs probably, but certainly not enough room for everyone.”
“Let me guess,” said Rodrigo with a wicked smile. “Magallanes swam back home with everyone clinging to his back. In full armor, no less.”
Instead of laughing, Espinosa’s face hardened, and he said, “You would do well to admire him, Rodrigo, for he has many fine traits that in you I find lacking.” Rodrigo clapped his mouth shut and Espinosa continued, “The ship’s officers planned to set off in the skiffs, promising to send a party back to rescue the common crew. But the crew protested, saying the ship’s officers meant to abandon them.”
“Did they?” I asked.
“They had planned on it. What did the officers care about the crew? After all, the officers were aristocrats, sons of nobles, and the crew naught but commoners. The scene grew ugly, and when it seemed certain blood would flow, Magallanes stepped forward and offered to stay behind with the crew while the rest of the officers fetched help.”
“And what happened?”
“The crew loved him for it, and the officers left without bloodshed. For three weeks Magallanes and the crew suffered under the scorching sun with few provisions.”
“I take it they were rescued,” said Rodrigo, “else Magallanes would not be here.”
“Yes, they were rescued. His selfless act was talked about for many months.”
“Just as how he is killing us now will be talked about for many years?” retorted Rodrigo. “Magallanes has marooned us here to die. We have only rotten goose meat and biscuit to eat. Plus he has sent the Santiago on a fool’s mission, looking for a passage that does not exist. They have been gone for weeks. They are probably shipwrecked, and this time His Holiness is not there to save them. Maybe he will send each ship out, one by one, until we are all dead.”
Espinosa fixed his gaze on Rodrigo. “Why do you hate him so, my friend?”
Rodrigo shrugged.
Espinosa was silent a long time before saying, “It is time to let your hatred go. It is time to stop punishing him for merely being Portuguese. Magallanes has been commissioned with an impossible task—to establish a westward route to the Spice Islands—a mission few in this world would dare attempt, much less accomplish. Give him room to succeed, my friend, and perhaps he shall surprise you.”
Each day we watched from our islet for the Santiago.
Each day we saw nothing but the endless stretch of gray sea.
On the third day of June, I turned fifteen years old. It has been one year, I thought, since my parents died, since I left Ávila, since I slept in the ditch by the river of mud. I have been through much. I brushed my fingers over my sparse whiskers, thinking, I am a man.
Shortly after midday, we saw a strange and wonderful sight. Never in all the time since we had been in Port San Julián had we seen another human being. In fact, not since the cannibals. Yet on this day, we saw a native. He was a giant, huge and well formed. When he saw us standing before the barracks, he danced on the shore of the mainland, twirling and leaping.
Magallanes ordered a seaman ashore in a skiff to invite the giant to our islet. At first the giant would not come, crossing his arms and planting his feet. Then the seaman did a hilarious thing. He pranced around the giant, dancing the same ridiculous dance. It worked. The giant smiled and climbed into the skiff.
When he came to the islet, we gathered about him, astonished at his great height. He was at least ten palms high and even the tallest Castilian among us did not reach above his neck. Except for yellow encircling his eyes, his entire face was painted red, with black heart-shaped emblems on his cheeks. He carried bow and arrows, the string of the bow made from animal gut and the arrows like ours except they had a stone point instead of iron. He wore the skins of the same animals we had found on the upper plains, only his clothing was well stitched and he placed them around his feet as well, leaving gigantic footprints wherever he stepped.
We quickly fetched him gifts from our trade stores. He glanced at himself in a mirror and shrieked, falling backward. When he recovered, we gave him mirrors and bells, combs and rosary beads. We offered him food and he devoured an amount that would have fed five men, maybe ten. It was astounding. Afterward, we rowed the giant back to the mainland.
That evening Magallanes ordered full rations of wine. For the first time in weeks I played my guitar. The men drummed rhythms, sang songs, laughed, and drank much wine.
The native did not return the next day, nor the next. Our vigil for the Santiago continued, only now we also watched the mainland for signs of natives.
By mid-June, the world outside turned a ghostly white, burying the ships under ice and snow. Our mood blackened. We sickened of so much meat. We tired of our barracks, now filthy with the stink of many men living together. We hated the wind that constantly howled, night and day, seeping through the cracks of the barracks to mock the fires. One of our shipmates was sick, the stench surrounding his bedding so nauseating we grew irritable to smell it and argued whose turn it was to change his furs.
One day when I told Rodrigo it was his turn, he pounded the wall of the barrack with his fist. “I cannot stand this! I must get out of here or I will go crazy.” Then he turned to me and, indeed, he looked crazy. His hair stood on end, messy
and unshorn. Stubble covered his face. He stared at me, his eyes wide and frantic, until I could see the whites all around them. I could smell his breath, hot and foul. “Mateo. I will pay you a ducat to change his bedding for me.”
“You do not have a ducat any more than I do.”
“I swear to you, as soon as I am wealthy, I shall pay you.”
“But I will be wealthy, too. What will one little ducat matter to me?”
“A thousand ducats then.”
“You will never have so much money.”
“I promise you, one day I shall be the wealthiest man in Spain.”
“Wealthier than the king?”
“The second wealthiest then. You can be my financial advisor.”
“Then, as your financial advisor, I advise you to save your money and change the bedding yourself.”
“Mateo, please.”
“No.”
“Mateo, please. I beg of you. If not for money, then for my sake.” And he stared at me with those crazy eyes.
I sighed and rolled my eyes. But I did what he asked, cursing with disgust until the task was done. “You owe me,” I said later.
He nodded and ran his hand through his hair. “I won’t forget, my friend. God help me, I hate this place.”
It was like that. These conversations. Crazy and desperate, as if this were a nightmare from which we couldn’t awaken. I hated this place, too. But now I wondered if Rodrigo was losing his mind.
Rodrigo had been right about one thing. The Santiago had indeed been shipwrecked. This we discovered when the survivors returned and told their tale.
“So now we are four ships instead of five,” complained Rodrigo. “We will be many men crammed together—if we ever leave this accursed place, that is. Do you realize, Mateo, that when we leave we will continue southward? There is no end. There is no mercy.”
“Be quiet, Rodrigo. You should be happy the Santiago’s men are safe.”
To the Edge of the World Page 10