The open door above let in a slanted rectangle of elongated light that pointed to the far corner where a man lay unconscious on the floor. His wrists were in shackles attached to a chain anchored into the stone wall behind him. Juan waited for the chorus of squeaks his six men made following him down the steps to stop before pacing over to the corner to hold his bucket of water over the captive’s head.
“Some labors I prefer to do myself,” he said before tipping the bucket just enough to produce a steady flow of water over the side. The initial splashes did nothing to rouse the unconscious man, so Juan tilted the bucket more and more until the entire contents fell out at once.
The heavy deluge slapped the captive’s head like a tidal wave and jolted him to sit upright against the wall. The man coughed and spat out water while his hands felt around and massaged the side of his head where a blow had rendered him unconscious a few hours earlier.
“We just keep running into each other don’t we, Master Toscanelli, or whoever you really are,” Juan taunted. “Seeing how you’ve fared in our two prior encounters, I can’t figure out why you don’t just avoid me like the plague. Yet here we are, again, with you in a bad way and me as the cause.”
“If I didn’t know any better, I’d say you were simple in the head, but I do know better, don’t I?” Juan declared as he tossed the empty bucket behind him for one of his agents to catch. “You’re a brilliant sailor and navigator, a learned swordsman, and apparently an accomplished spy given how much you know about things you should not.”
“Who are you? Why do you keep getting involved in my affairs?” Juan demanded. When the captive did not answer, he delivered two swift kicks to the man’s ribs to loosen his tongue. “Answer me damn you!”
“I have questions of my own for you,” the captive finally replied between coughs with an unwarranted arrogance, as if he were the captor rather than the captive. “You discover new lands to the west for the king of Portugal and murdered an entire crew to keep it secret. A few years later you talked the Spanish queen into sponsoring Columbus’ voyage west; a voyage you knew would uncover the very secret you committed murder to protect. Why? Whose agenda are you working toward?”
“Whichever benefits me most,” Juan declared without shame.
“Then you and I should be fast friends,” the captive said with a confident grin. “The voyage west was a success. I was a part of it and so were you by convincing the queen to sponsor it.”
The shackled man leaned forward with eager intent burning in his eyes as he elaborated further. “We are both destined to have large tracts of land granted to us in the New World under the Spanish banner that sponsors us. Why then are you so intent on bringing the English, French, and anyone else who will listen over to compete for the same land? It goes against your own self interests.”
Juan said nothing, but the captive divined his own conclusion from the loaded silence. “Ah, it’s Portugal isn’t it. You want the other European powers to commit all their efforts to acquiring the new lands. That way Portugal can solidify its monopoly on water bound trade with the Far East around Africa.”
“King John is a shrewd man,” the navigator went on. “What did he promise you: land, coin, women, ships, trade licenses?”
“My rewards will be far greater than any of that,” Juan replied, but stopped himself just short from elaborating further. His ambition of his father naming him as the legitimate heir to the Portuguese throne was his private business and no one else’s concern.
The navigator took a silent moment to focus his eyes on Juan’s face. The intense gaze seemed to read every line, every crease around his eyes and mouth to find answers to a question he had not asked. It was as if he were trying to read his thoughts. Juan was about to laugh off the notion until the navigator spoke again in a hushed voice only Juan could hear.
“Only one thing commands your kind of loyalty. That validation you seek from King John, it will never happen. Bastards are tools, not sons to their fathers.”
“You have guaranteed wealth with Spain but only the promise of riches with Portugal,” the navigator went on in a loud voice once more. “Take it from a man who’s been around for a long, long time; a bird in hand is far more valuable than two in the bush.”
The shock Juan felt in that moment was so intense that he had to swallow hard to prevent his lunch from coming back up. This man healed himself with magic water and now divined Juan’s most guarded secret with nothing more than a look. What manner of witchcraft did he command?
Juan did not like the turn this interrogation took one bit. He was in charge. He would ask the questions. With that in mind, Juan pointed out the prisoner’s unintended admission. “You’ve been around for a long time, which means you are the same navigator I ran through as a boy. How can that possibly be? I stabbed you through the heart, and then drowned you out in the middle of the ocean for good measure.”
“You tell me,” the captive insisted. “You saw what you saw in London, didn’t you?”
“I saw you use healing water to mend your wounds. That still doesn’t explain your coming back from the dead.”
“You’ve lived an interesting life so far, Juan. Have you come across anything in all your years to explain it? Any readings, any legends or wartime stories to explain my continued existence?” the prisoner asked.
Juan’s mind grabbed onto that last offering. Only one word came to mind, and he recited it with an eerie wonder in his voice, “al-Khidr.”
“Gasundheit,” the prisoner mocked with a laugh, but his eyes betrayed his attempted dismissal. The man knew exactly what Juan was talking about.
“Many of the Muslims I fought against in the Moorish War, even their king, prayed to an emissary of their god, a spiritual guide they called al-Khidr, when they were about to die. It happened often enough that I did some reading on the subject. In doing so, I found the legend of a man who discovered healing water that allowed him to live for eternity, al-Khidr.”
“An emissary of God,” the captive repeated. “I never figured you for the religious type, what with all the poisoning, stabbing, and general murder you’ve been carrying on with. Tell me; is this little spiritual epiphany of yours a rather recent thing?”
“Everything good in my life I owe to the Almighty. By doing his will and fighting the evils of this world, I have known nothing but reward. There is nothing recent or fleeting about my faith,” Juan gave as his emphatic retort.
“If you truly believe I am an emissary of God, then do you think it’s wise to tempt the Almighty’s wrath by killing his messengers?”
“Not my god; the Muslim’s false god,” Juan corrected as he lowered himself until reaching eye level with his captive. “My god demands that I fight evil with everything that I am, and the Muslim’s god is part of that evil. I think you and your witchcraft are a profound evil set upon this world, one that my god has spent my entire lifetime guiding and preparing me to defeat.”
“All I’ve wanted to do from the very beginning was see that the new lands get settled quickly and with minimal infighting between nations. How is that evil?” the captive asked.
“You are trying to settle those new lands with your Moorish worshipers so they can spread their ungodly ways,” Juan fired back. “I won’t let it happen, no matter how many times I have to kill you. It is my holy duty.”
“Oh spare me. You fight me because I stand in the way of you currying favor with the king of Portugal. You crave the power and authority he can grant you, but here’s the flaw in all of that, Juan. Even if you were the king himself with all that wealth and power, it is fleeting,” the navigator said with a whimsical toss of his hand in the air.
“No matter what you do or acquire, you will die some day and it will all be gone. It is the nature of your existence, just like everyone else in this world except me,” the navigator declared. “I, along with my healing water, am the only one on Earth with any real power.”
The navigator let his boastful words ra
ttle around the cellar walls for a set of heartbeats before extending his offer. “I can share my secrets, my power with you.”
Juan’s mind raced with the possibilities. The secret to eternal life was true power. He was tempted, until he realized that is all it was, a temptation. The devil was tempting him to stray. God would grant him eternal salvation in the next life, not this agent of evil before him now.
“Be gone, Satan,” Juan shouted on the way to his feet once more. “Be gone from this world!”
“Fool,” the bound prisoner taunted before lunging for Juan’s neck and shouting at the top of his lungs, “Then get on with your duty and be quick about it. Kill me now. We both know you have it in you.”
Juan deflected the charge and threw his captive back to the ground. “Tempting, but it occurs to me that I’ve already tried that; a couple of times actually. Yet you continue turning up to meddle in my affairs. Clearly I can’t kill this demon I see before me, but there are things worse than death.”
Juan straightened his tunic and backed away from his captive with an acerbic smirk. “I’m afraid there will be nothing quick about your defeat at my hands this time. You’re going to be in here, alone, for a long, long time.”
“Oh, and if you are counting on your friend Columbus to help you, don’t get your hopes up. Any friend of yours is an enemy of mine,” Juan said before turning to ascend the cellar steps.
“You have the devil in you, Sir. I’ve seen his work often enough to know,” the captive called after Juan as he ascended the wooden steps with his men in tow.
“I bet you have,” Juan replied before shutting and locking the cellar door behind them. Afterward, he turned to one of the Spanish brothers, “Empty his chamber pot, and feed him once a day. Besides that, let him rot in the darkness he serves. If anyone besides the six of us approaches this farm, kill him.”
Juan then looked at the others. “You all saw and heard for yourselves what we face. We have only contained this evil for now. We must prepare for the future battle and find the source of this healing water of his. Spare no expense, and leave no hamlet or hovel unsearched on this continent. While you do that, I have a boat to catch. Godspeed.”
Chapter 25: Long Overdue Arrival
HASTELLOY FELT CONSCIOUSNESS returning to him. His natural instinct was to open his eyes and verify the sensation, but it made no real difference. The inside of his eyelids looked about the same as the root cellar, pitch-black.
There was one light source, though labeling it as such was a bit of a stretch. Ten feet above floor level was a faint line of illumination coming from the bottom of the cellar door. The gap was only a fraction of an inch wide, and was obscured by the wooden stairway leading down into the cellar, but it was something. Surviving solitary confinement was all about finding that something.
Hastelloy spent a few minutes, or maybe it was hours, looking at that sliver of light. He put his mind through a mental exercise where he constructed a mock religion around the light source since all the main elements were there. It commanded an elevated position in Hastelloy’s secluded world. The illumination was the only good thing in his life. The crack let in air to keep him alive, and eventually the door would serve as his gateway to salvation.
The religion would even have the element of good versus evil. The light brought with it the good, and his chamber pot contained the bad. He kept the smelly thing as far away as his chains would allow, but nothing was far enough. He tried timing his bowel movements to coincide with his captor entering to deliver his daily ration and empty the pot, but that timing was unpredictable.
“All right, all right my almighty light. Thy will be done,” Hastelloy said in a mocking voice on the way to his knees. “Your first commandment: thou shalt do two hundred pushups.”
Hastelloy stretched out into a plank position and began the set. He recalled his first days of captivity when he could not even manage twenty pushups without needing to take a break. That was a long time ago. Now he pushed his way through a hundred and fifty without even breathing heavy.
“Second commandment: though shalt run in place until your food arrives,” Hastelloy said aloud to keep his vocal chords in practice.
Despite the fact that he hated running, this was Hastelloy’s favorite part to his daily routine. There was no telling how long he would be on his feet. If he got bored with simply jogging in place, he would plant his hands against the wall and do knee drives for a while. Sometimes his suffer fests lasted for hours, other times his food arrived within minutes of him getting started. It was the gambling, unpredictable nature that made it an entertaining game.
This time around, Hastelloy lost his little bet with himself. Many hours passed before a screeching snap from on high announced that his captor had unfastened the lock. Hastelloy quickly grabbed his marking stone and gouged another bar into the masonry. Each bar counted as a week.
Hastelloy made sure to keep his back turned to the entrance when the door opened. His eyes could not handle the flood of direct light. Instead, he focused on his wall and tallied up the bars. One hundred and twenty-two bars was the count. He had been in solitary captivity for over two years now.
As per usual, his captor said nothing. The Spaniard tossed a pan of beans with a few biscuits of hardtack onto the floor. He placed a large bucket of water next to it and then took the chamber pot out with him. A few moments later, the man returned and hurled the brass pot as hard as he could at Hastelloy from the doorway. Depending on how drunk the man was, his aim could be dead-on or twenty feet off.
Next came the darkness, again. Hastelloy felt around the ground until he located his food and water. He took his seat in the dark, quiet, and lonely room to consume his meal.
There was always the temptation to starve himself to death in order to escape his imprisonment by regenerating via the Nexus device, but he could not do that. Suicide went against the moral fiber of his people.
When the Nexus first became widely used throughout Novan society, people would kill themselves on a whim. Maybe they had a bad day or despised life with their spouse or family, so they ended it. Using the Nexus proved a convenient tool to get around the till death do us part section of the union vows.
Others abused the Nexus to improve their physical forms. If they did not like the look of their nose, a new one was just a quick slit of the wrist away. The abuse reached its most perverse levels when people started altering their physical forms completely. If they wanted to know what it was like to fly like a bird, they only had to adjust the regeneration chamber, kill themselves, and away they flew.
The sanctity of life itself lost all meaning for the Novi during those dark years. The only thing that saved their society was the council signing user guidelines into law. Individuals could only regenerate into their original physical form; ugly nose and all. If a person’s death was ruled a suicide, their life force was expunged from the Nexus and terminated.
For almost twelve thousand years, using the Nexus by means of suicide was the most despicable act a Novan could contemplate. Not only were the individuals executed, but their remaining family members were treated as pariahs and shunned. The last incident of suicide declared by the courts occurred over ten thousand years ago. It was a measure of absolute last resort for Hastelloy, and he was not out of options just yet.
His captivity was torturous, but it did serve some purpose. His conversation with Juan before the door was locked set the notion that Hastelloy worked alone. It also misdirected Juan’s efforts toward the healing waters rather than the Nexus. Hastelloy’s long solitude also gave him the time to truly plan how to deal with Juan. There would be no more winging it once Hastelloy got away from his captivity.
“Your third commandment,” Hastelloy eventually said to the sliver of light on high. “Though shalt let thy food digest before doing five hundred sit-ups.”
Hastelloy leaned back until his tired body lay flat on the dirt floor. He closed his eyes, or at least he thought he did, and let his ot
her senses take over. The foul stench let him know his chamber pot was twelve feet to his right; it appeared that the Spaniard was rather intoxicated this day.
His ears heard a slight whistling coming from the doorway that told him it was a windy day outside. His ears also detected something else, something new. It was metal clanking against metal, like a blacksmith hammering out a new blade. The repeated banging continued, and drew closer to the door. The noise also brought with it the sounds of heavy breathing and desperate grunts of effort.
The clashes, breathing, and grunting crescendoed in volume until a climactic cry, a man’s death wail, let loose right outside the cellar door. Then all fell silent except for the soft sound of footfalls approaching the door. All of a sudden the door flung open and drenched the room in sunlight. Hastelloy could not bear to look at it until the tall silhouette of a man blocked the sun’s rays by stepping into the doorway.
“Captain,” the silhouette called down into the dark cellar. “Captain, are you there? Are you all right?”
And the light shall bring unto you a deliverer, Hastelloy thought before answering. “I’m here, Valnor, but I’m pretty damned far from all right.”
Two hours later Hastelloy found himself, once again, shaving his face and trimming his scraggly hair with Valnor watching. Since his release from captivity, barely a word was spoken between the two.
Valnor had the good sense to remain quiet while Hastelloy got acclimated to the outside world again. Going from no stimulation to dealing with the world and all its chaos took time. Eventually the ensign ventured a harmless statement to begin their dialogue. “A bath after all that time must have felt like coming out of the Nexus device for the first time.”
Hastelloy was not interested in reliving any moments from his captivity or escape. The trauma was in the past now and, for the sake of his mental health, Hastelloy had closed and locked that door behind him. All that mattered from here was the future and dealing with the danger posed by Juan and his agents.
Origins: Discovery Page 17