“Deal.”
Two hours later, stocked with food and a case of the captain’s favorite Sagres Branca beer, they motored slowly out of the port, turning around the long breakwater then swinging sharply around the remains of the old volcano before heading west along the rugged coastline of the island, bearing a little north into the open sea, heading toward Corvo.
Peggy had taken Holliday’s Bradt guide and was sunning herself on the forward deck while Holliday sat beside Capitano Tavares in the companion chair on the flybridge high above the main deck of the boat. The San Pedro was doing a steady eighteen knots, muscling easily through the gentle swell. The sea was dark blue, almost a steely black. A few petrels whirled and dipped in their wake, but except for the birds they were alone on the ocean.
Far ahead on the distant horizon Holliday could see a broadening line of dark clouds gathering. They were heading into a storm. It occurred to him that the weather had been absolutely perfect ever since he’d left West Point. The closest thing to a problem had been the fog approaching Friedrichshafen. From the looks of the sky ahead, that was about to change.
“Storm coming,” commented Holliday.
Tavares took the bottle of beer out of its polystyrene holder in front of him and sucked on the neck for a few seconds. He gave a little belch and put the bottle back in its holder.
“Long time yet,” he said. “Manuel Tavares knows these things.” He turned and smiled. He poked himself in the eye. “Captain Jack Sparrow has no need to worry, yes?” He laughed at his own joke. “That Johnny Depp, he’s a funny guy, no?” He laughed again. “What kind of name is that—Depp? Something you put in the hair to make it shiny, yes? Depp! Ha!”
“You know Corvo?” Holliday asked.
“Do I know Corvo! Of course! I was born there! Corvo is one cattle, a big fat brown one with udders like Scotland bag flutes. Lying down in the grass. Looking out at the ocean, chewing grass. Waiting for the milk. That is Corvo. Maybe one goat, as well.”
“Are there any stories of treasure?” Holliday asked.
“Sure! Sure!” nodded Tavares. “Moby Dick!”
“The whale?”
“Yes, of course. It was written in the book about Corvo. The courage of her men. ‘Call me Ishmael,’ yes? There was a statue. A man with a finger pointing west to Boston, the Holy Virgin. A whaler. Who knows? A statue and a pot of gold coins. Very old. Phoenicia, yes? You know it?”
“You’re kidding, right?” Holliday said.
Phoenicia was the ancient name for Canaan. Phoenician coins had been found in the old foundations of Castle Pelerin. It was too much of a coincidence. Myths turned to reality, legend to fact, like Schliemann discovering Troy.
“No! No! True, swear to God! Coins. Found in fifteenth century by a priest named Gao, I think. Ponta do Marco, the very edge of the world! I will take you there!”
Bless you, Uncle Henry, Holliday thought. Somehow he’d managed to make the right choice; the odyssey continued.
The weather worsened with each passing hour. The dark smudge of clouds staining the western horizon became a black, roiled wall of thunderclouds, their flattened undersides stretched out like hammered anvils blocking out the sun and the blue sky. Peggy came in from her sunbathing, then Holliday and finally the captain climbed down from the flybridge. All three of them huddled in the protection of the lower helm overhang as the blustering wind blew up the waves into a frothing mass of spume-tossed peaks and valleys. The San Pedro continued to hammer forward, the old fiberglass hull crashing through the heaving swell, forcing itself along the line Manuel Rivero Tavares had decreed.
It began to rain. The drops fell in sheets as one gale after another roared over them. Peggy finally disappeared into the forward cabin while Holliday remained with Tavares at the helm.
“How long will it last?” Holliday yelled into the Portuguese captain’s ear.
“At least through the night, perhaps longer,” he answered. “There is no point in making for Corvo; the harbor at Flores is a better choice.”
“You’re the captain,” said Holliday. “Whatever you say.”
Tavares nodded and spun the wheel. They turned a little further west, away from their goal. An hour later Flores came in sight, and an hour after that the San Pedro reached the tiny harbor of Santa Cruz das Flores, a single concrete pier in the lee of a tiny village huddled at the base of a battery of rugged hills.
The buildings of the village were rough lava stone mortared together and topped with the standard Portuguese style terra-cotta tiles. They found a restaurant in the town square and had a meal of octopus stewed in wine, rabbit stew, and fresh-baked bread and creamery butter.
After the meal Tavares disappeared for a few minutes, returning with an elderly man in tow whom he introduced as Dr. Emilio Silva. Dr. Silva wore enormous rubber boots, a completely transparent raincoat, and what appeared to be a very old-fashioned military uniform underneath.
He smoked a long, fuming clay pipe and appeared to be heading toward a hundred years of age, his face a wrinkled map of a long, arduous life. His eyes were clear, however, and when he spoke his voice, though as wispy and cracked as his face, was firm and coherent. According to Tavares the doctor had lived in the islands all of his life, and anyone or anything he didn’t know wasn’t worth knowing.
He told the story of the statue and the coins, again with Tavares as his translator. The man’s name was Damien de Goes, not Gao as Tavares had thought, and the statue had been of a bareheaded “Moorish” man—presumably black or at least swarthy—wearing a cape and seated on a horse, his right arm raised and pointing to the west. At his feet there had been a cauldron or kettle containing a hoard of treasure including five bronze and two gold coins from Cyrene in North Africa and from the Phoenician colony of Carthage, now modern Tunisia. Remarkably detailed for a myth or an old wives’ tale.
As the old man recounted the story, Holliday remembered an old map he’d once seen in a museum drawn by the Pizzigano brothers, a team of cartographers working in the early 1300’s—long before the Azores had actually been discovered and almost two hundred years before Columbus.
The Pizzigano brothers, illustrating an ancient Phoenician myth, showed a man on horseback at the edge of their map, just about where the Azores would be located. The man was pointing westward, and a medallion at his feet warned that anyone venturing further would be swallowed up in “The Sea of Fog and Darkness”—not a bad description of the North Atlantic when it was in bad humor.
Interestingly the same “sea of fog and darkness” term had once been used by a Moorish Muslim cartographer in Spain named Khashkhash ibn Saeed ibn Aswad to describe a voyage made in the ninth century—a full five hundred years before Columbus. Even the name of the place where the statue had been found on the island of Corvo rang true: Ponta do Marco—the boundary marker—go no further. X marks the spot.
“He says,” said Tavares, continuing to translate, “that there is a man on Corvo who we should see if we have any more questions.” He turned to the old man again. “Como o senhor te chama?” What is his name?
“Rodrigues,” said the old man clearly, his yellow teeth clamped around the stem of the long clay pipe. “Helder Rodrigues. Clerigo.”
“A priest,” said Tavares. “He says the man you should see is a priest.”
30
Capitano Tavares ferried them across to Corvo the following morning. The day was moody, the skies full of broken clouds that scudded low on the horizon over a choppy, restless sea. The San Pedro slapped the small waves sullenly, the movement jarring. Corvo was visible from the time they rounded the breakwater at Santa Cruz das Flores. It stood like a massive cupcake, one side slumped in the pan, a single volcanic cone worn by a million years of winds and storms, shouldering its way through the eons, the fire that had created it long since cooled, the steep slopes covered with a thick carpet of greenery, its giant cliffs like the massive bow of an ancient ship.
Barely fifteen miles separated Flo
res from its smaller sister; the voyage in the San Pedro lasted barely forty minutes. The town of Corvo clung to the sloped, southernmost portion of the island, a scattering of red-tile-roofed houses wedged in around a straight concrete pier with no breakwater.
Instead of docking, Tavares guided the old Chris-Craft north, following the steep coastline away from the town.
“Where are we going?” Peggy asked as the town receded in their wake.
“Around the island. A few minutes only. I show you Ponta do Marco. End of the world.”
They continued northward, the coast steepening to dark, plunging cliffs of volcanic basalt, the sea breaking in huge shuddering waves at the bottom. There was no middle ground, not even a rocky beach. There was the sea, and then there was the land, an irresistible force meeting an immovable object, one trying to wear down the other in a never-ending battle that had already lasted millions of years.
Holliday thought about the sword and the man who might have carried it. Was this his destination? Was this lonely island in the middle of an even lone lier sea the final resting place of the great treasure that had been hidden since the time of Christ beneath the Temple of Solomon in the holy city of Jerusalem? Or had it all been nothing more than a story, a fancy like King Arthur and his sword, Excalibur?
Standing there, feet braced against the rocking of the boat, it occurred to Holliday that perhaps it didn’t matter. The sword, the story behind it, and the long journey were enough to have changed and molded events and men’s lives across two thousand years, and a story told that long and with that effect had to have some meaning behind it. Arthur and Excalibur may well have been nothing but childish myth, but it was a myth that had moved millions and changed lives.
“You’ve got that thousand-mile-stare expression on your face, Doc,” said Peggy, standing at his side. She smiled fondly at him. “Looking into history again?”
“Something like that,” he nodded.
Tavares spun the wheel, and the San Pedro heeled over slightly as they turned around a rocky headland. He pointed.
“There!” he said. “Ponta do Marco. The end of the world!”
They were at the northernmost tip of the island. The caldera of the old volcano rose like a jagged green wall, slightly terraced into narrow overlapping ledges that ran directly down into the crashing sea. The heights of the caldera were shrouded in gray rags of cloud and mist.
Standing in front of this looming wall were three black slabs of rock, each one lower than the first, their spires sharp and splintered like giant flakes of obsidian. The three formations each stood separate from the others, the caldera cliff rising like spidery stone fingers clawing up from the sea. The base of the spires was hidden in deep shadow and skirts of rising foam, but for a second Holliday thought he saw a darker patch that might have been the narrow entrance to a cavern.
“The statue stood at the top of the black pillar!” Tavares yelled, pointing upward. Holliday stared.
The foot of the three bony fingers was a froth of crashing surf that threw up enormous curtains of foaming spray, the sound like echoing thunderclaps. Tavares was right; it did look just like the end of the world. Beyond it there was nothing but empty sea. The captain threw the throttles into neutral.
The engines surged and whined and the San Pedro bobbed unhappily on the rolling chop racing under her hull to throw itself onto the great black rocks directly in front of them a few hundred yards away. Peggy was starting to look a little green.
“I thought I saw the mouth of a cave!” Holliday yelled, raising his voice over the booming surf.
“Perhaps!” Tavares shrugged. “No one has ever landed here! There is no beach, only the cliffs!” He shook his head. “A dangerous place. The home of the great beast god, Adamastor!”
Holliday hadn’t heard that name in years. Once, when he was no more than a child, Uncle Henry had told him a bedtime story from memory that had scared him out of his wits. He could still hear his uncle’s rich voice, rolling out of the darkness of his bedroom like the surf upon this broken shore:
“Even as I spoke, an immense shape
Materialized in the night air,
Grotesque and of enormous stature
With heavy jowls, and an unkempt beard,
Scowling from shrunken, hollow eyes,
Its complexion earthy and pale,
Its hair grizzled and matted with clay,
Its mouth coal black, teeth yellow with
decay—Adamastor!”
It was the kind of thing that would have given Edgar Allan Poe food for thought. Much later Holliday had learned that Henry’s tale was from the epic Portuguese poem The Lusiads, which contained the famous threat: “Defy me not for I am that vast, secret promontory you Portuguese call the Cape of Storms . . .”
He stared at the black spires and the foaming surf, trying to see in his mind’s eye a Templar ship and its precious cargo. Had it somehow managed to find a safe landfall here? If that were true it wasn’t hard to imagine that no other ship had followed for the last eight hundred years. The sword’s secret would have been safe in the protection of these bleak, stone monsters and the pounding sea.
“Bastante,” said Tavares. Enough. He engaged the big twin diesels and pushed the throttles forward, spinning the wheel and turning away from the rocky headland. A few minutes later and they rounded the island onto the lee side. Almost instantly the sea calmed, and the wind died as they chugged their way along the opposite coastline. The cliffs here were less precipitous, the slopes of the caldera thick with clover.
The further south they went the easier the slopes became, and eventually Holliday could see Tavares’s fat brown cows in the little fields, legs tucked beneath them, staring blankly out to the ragged, uneasy sea. Less than half an hour later they rounded the south cape and came in sight of the little village once again. More storm clouds were gathering as Tavares guided the San Pedro toward the wharf.
“I radioed ahead last night,” said the heavyset captain. “My cousin Sebastian will rent you his motorcycle. Only twenty euro plus gas. He is waiting on the dock. He will give you directions to find this priest, Rodrigues.”
“You’ll wait for us?”
“I’ll be here until an hour before sunset. Then I go back to Flores for the night. I do not like the look of this weather.”
“All right,” agreed Holliday.
Sebastian Brigada, Tavares’s cousin, was a man in his thirties, tall, dark-haired with a big caterpillar mustache and caterpillar eyebrows. He smoked a pipe, wore an old tweed cap and giant rubber boots. As promised he was waiting for them on the dock with his motorcycle, a rickety old Casal with a square gas tank, almost no instruments, and a homemade bullet-nose sidecar fitted with its own windscreen and two skinny bicycle tires on a fragile-looking axle.
“No way,” said Peggy, looking at the sidecar. “You expect me to ride in that?”
“Not much choice.” Holliday shrugged. “It’s the only game in town.” He dug into his wallet and handed Sebastian Brigada a twenty-euro note. Brigada nodded his thanks and handed over the bike. As it turned out the directions to Rodrigues’s house were simple enough since there was only one road and one turnoff. You either followed the branch that led to the rim of the old crater or the branch that took you down to the crater floor. Rodrigues lived in a cottage at the end of the branch leading to the crater floor.
Holliday thanked Tavares’s cousin once again and climbed onto the bike. Peggy eased herself into the sidecar and sat down. Brigada showed Holliday how to switch on the engine, and a few moments later they were chattering off down the island’s single paved road, tiny pocket-handkerchief fields on either side, divided at irregular intervals by dry stone walls that looked as old as time. Ahead of them the sweeping slope of the volcano rose up into the sullen mist. A few big shearwater gulls rode the air currents like shifting ghosts, and a few of Tavares’s fat brown cows lounged in the heather, but except for that the landscape was silent and empty. There seem
ed to be no people and no houses anywhere, and there was no traffic on the unmarked one-lane road at all.
“Pretty spooky,” commented Peggy over the clattering of the old motorcycle. “Hound of the Baskervilles time.”
She was right, thought Holliday: the whole island had the sinister, primordial tension of a place like Dart-moor. Man had no business in a place like this; it was a land of bad dreams and banshees. He shivered. An old wives’ tale—somebody walking over his grave.
They followed the road upward for another mile. Finally they reached a crossroads, one section of the road rising away into the fog on their right, the other fork dropping away on their left. Holliday braked, and they came to a stop. There was a plain sign pointing down the lower road that said simply CALDEIRĂO—the crater.
“Why would a priest live out here in the middle of nowhere?” Peggy asked from the sidecar.
“Only one way to find out,” answered Holliday. He put the bike in gear, eased off on the brake and opened the throttle. They turned down the road leading to the crater. Five minutes later Holliday slowed and stopped again as they climbed a final hill. There, below them, almost a thousand feet deep, lay the bottom of the crater, a gigantic punchbowl amphitheatre at least two miles across, the walls rising, green and steeply sloping, on three sides. At the very bottom of the crater were two small lakes, and between them on a connecting strip of pasture they could see a small cottage surrounded by a stone wall. The priest’s house.
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