Travellers in Magic

by Lisa Goldstein

  The chief said nothing. Nuad took it as a dismissal. “Remember my words,” he said as he left. “He’ll return with an army at his back.”

  That evening after dinner Tuala escorted them to a room filled with musicians and dancers. To Walter’s surprise the chief took to the floor and danced a wild and complex measure with a young woman. “Come, Sir Walter, join us,” Tuala said when the dance had ended.

  His leg was bad that night—he should not have walked so long and so hard. “Nay, I thank you,” he said. Some of his company, he saw, were choosing up partners for the next dance.

  “Then we will talk awhile,” the chief said.

  He sat easily, not even winded from the dance. In the candles on the table the golden glow of his skin was very pronounced. How old was Tuala? He had spoken of the huts of London as if he had seen them personally. For a heart-stopping moment, a moment in which it seemed as if he hung, dizzyingly, over a precipice, Walter wondered if these folks were immortal. “How old are you?” Walter said.

  Tuala smiled. “Nearly a hundred.”

  Not immortal then, Walter thought, feeling both relieved and disappointed. “Tell me about your king,” the chief said.

  Walter shrugged. “I barely know him. I served Elizabeth, who was queen before him.”

  “Ah. And what was she like?”

  “Wise and beautiful, virtuous and kind,” he said. He put aside his memories of her last days, her back gone crooked and her teeth rotted to blackness in her mouth. A lady whom time had surprised, he had called her once.

  “And James? Is he wise as well?”

  “I don’t know.”

  “Was it he who sent you to prison?”

  Walter nodded.

  “Then he cannot be so very wise, I think.”

  “Nay, he is a coward.” The words burst from him before he was aware of them. “He wears a thick padded jerkin, summer and winter, because he fears the assassin’s knife. He sent a man to spy on me, a coward like himself, who would only fight when he saw the odds were on his side, or when he could attack from behind.”

  “Then why do you serve him?”

  “Because he is king. Because God appointed him king.”

  Tuala said nothing. Walter thought over what he had said, wondering how it would appear to this strange man before him. It was true that he would have preferred to serve Elizabeth to the end of his days. Like a feudal serf he gave his loyalty to few, and always to a person rather than an institution. James had never earned his trust; perhaps that was why he had been sent to the Tower.

  “The dances are ending,” the chief said. “We had best go to bed.”

  That night Walter dreamed of Wat. He had hardly thought of his son in the past few days, had put out of his mind the letter he would have to write to Bess. Yet when he woke he thought he saw the boy standing in front of him, like an avenging ghost in a play.

  Wat was dead, and the other man who had been shot by the Spanish—sweet God, he didn’t even know his name! By what right did he think he could command men to do as he ordered, to send them even to their deaths? God had not appointed him king. He had been driven only by personal ambition and his hope for gain.

  Nay, it was worse than that. Nuad had been right—he was nothing but a common thief, a man without honor. What was the difference, after all, between robbing a man and plundering a country? The latter had been sanctioned by a king, true, but what was the word of James worth?

  He stayed in his room the next day, thinking and writing in his journal. Toward evening he went out and walked through the gardens to the plains beyond. He must not have come to the borders of the chief’s country, because no one made as if to stop him. He had the sense he was being watched.

  The walls of his cell widened outward to take in the entire plain. Then it seemed as if they widened still further, that his mind grew to encompass all he had learned in the past few weeks. He thought of the Ewaipanoma, and the Amazons, and the folk of El Dorado.

  He turned and went in search of the chief.

  “I have another plan,” Walter said to Tuala. “I do not choose to forget the beauties of your country. But I won’t stay in any prison, no matter how fair. I’ll go back to King James and say of my own free will that I have not found El Dorado.”

  “And what will the king do then? What happens when you return without the treasure you promised him?”

  “I don’t know.”

  “I daresay you have some idea. We have spoken to some of your men—they tell us you will be killed if you return without the location of the mine.”

  So the old chief knew that as well. Was there nothing of his life hidden from this man?

  “Can we trust you to keep our secret in the face of death?” the chief asked.

  Walter nodded slowly. “I promise you I will do it. You have my word on it.”

  “You surprise me. And yet I find I believe you. But if that’s true then we can’t allow you to go back—we won’t have your death on our hands. Stay here, Sir Walter. You’ll find that your prison will be very fair indeed. We’ll give you the liberty of our city—you’ll study the old books with us and learn our philosophy.”

  “Nay—I’ve had enough of prisons. And what of my wife? What will she think when I don’t return?”

  “What good can you do her under a sentence of death?”

  “Very well, then, what will happen to you? Someone will guess where I am and come after me. What will you do then?”

  “We cannot keep our city a secret much longer. The world is opening up to travellers and explorers—sooner or later we will be discovered. Already stories about us are spreading throughout the land. We need another hundred years or so, and then we will be ready.”

  “What do you mean?”

  “I mean that when this plain is finally explored there will be no trace of us left. We will have gone away, into the heart of the jungle. People will think the stories of El Dorado a myth, nothing more.”

  “Then let me grant you the time you need. Let me tell the king there is no El Dorado.”

  The chief sighed. “I’ll have to think about it. But I will tell you this, Sir Walter—you have more courage than any man I have ever met. Your king was a fool to keep you imprisoned.”

  “Aye, he was,” Walter said, and grinned. Somehow he had transferred his loyalty to this chief who sat before him. Nay, not a chief—he had wanted to be called king. And why not? He had earned the title, unlike James.

  One of Tuala’s men led Walter through the main tower to a room he had never seen before. Something Tuala had said made Walter think the man might be some sort of surgeon, but one who practiced a medicine unlike any Walter had ever known. The surgeon stopped at a doorway and took out a key. Walter looked on in surprise—he had not seen any locked rooms since he had come to El Dorado, not even his own.

  The surgeon opened the door. Francis lay on a bed inside. He sat up when the surgeon came in and began to speak angrily. “Why am I imprisoned here? When am I to be released?” His eyes widened when he saw Walter, and he had the grace to look afraid.

  “I would not have killed you,” Francis said quickly. “I was to make certain you claimed El Dorado for King James, nothing more.”

  “Of course,” Walter said evenly. Did the man’s treachery have no end? Was this fool typical of the men James liked to have around him? Elizabeth would have taken Francis’s measure in minutes, and then dismissed him forever.

  The surgeon gave Francis food and drink, and the man ate and drank hungrily. “You’ll get me out, won’t you, Sir Walter? When the king finds out how I’ve been treated he won’t be pleased. He’ll return with an army, won’t he, sir? Tell this fool what the king will do to him.”

  His words grew slower, disjointed. Finally he lay back on the bed, his eyes unfocused. “I put the potion in his drink,” the surgeon said. “Watch.”

  Fascinated, Walter listened as the surgeon described a journey Francis had never taken. The surgeon led Francis over t
he plains and beyond, to the forests and highlands of the lower Orinoco. Francis nodded in agreement, his eyes glazed. “When you return to your ship you will remember nothing of this city,” the surgeon said. “You will be able to tell your king you could not find us. El Dorado is a pretty story, nothing more.”

  Francis nodded. “A pretty story,” he said, and slept.

  Three months later, at dawn, King James’s men led Sir Walter from the Gatehouse to the scaffold at Westminster Hall. Someone kindly gave him a cup of sack and asked how he liked it. “It’s a good drink,” Walter said, “if a man might tarry at it,” and was pleased to see that the old jest still had the power to make men laugh.

  He felt very nearly content. The fever that had infected him on the way to Guiana had returned, and his limp was worse than ever. He was an old man, his life over. Yet he had one act more to play out, one final secret to carry to the grave.

  All during the voyage home, while around him his men slowly forgot the gardens and golden towers, while they spoke of a voyage that had never happened, a dream-voyage, he had torn out pages from his journal and substituted another story. Anyone who found his journal would think that he had never left Trinidad. He wrote a letter to Bess and thought about Wat, his impetuous son who had been so much like him. His life was over. He had lost, and won. He had found quite another sort of riches.

  In the dawn air he shook from cold and from his fever. He hoped that the crowd would not take his shivering for fear. For there was a crowd, and a large one, although King James had scheduled the execution on the same day as the Lord Mayor’s pageants and shows. It was important that all of London talk about his execution, and that there be no mention of the gold mine he had gone to find. His death would buy King Tuala and his people the hundred years they needed.

  He mounted the scaffold and looked out over the crowd. In spite of himself he felt gratified that so many people had come to see him, all his old friends and enemies, even folks who knew him only as a legend. “I thank God that He has sent me to die in the sight of so honorable an assembly and not in the darkness,” he said.

  His listeners expected to hear a defense of the charges of treason and atheism brought against him, and so he spoke a little more. He saw their upturned faces, listening raptly. Aye, he had not lost the ability to move a crowd. London would talk about nothing else for a very long time to come.

  Finally he lay himself down on the block. The executioner hesitated, and he heard someone say into the silence, “We have not another such head to be cut off.” He closed his eyes and saw before him the high towers of El Dorado, and then the shadow of the axe. Then he saw and heard nothing more.

  AFTERWORD

  Infinite Riches” grew out of research I did for my Elizabethan novel Strange Devices of the Sun and Moon. Most Elizabethans, I found, led lives as compelling as novels; some days I gave up the pretense of research entirely and just read where my fancy took me. What fascinated me about Sir Walter Raleigh was how he was able to go from a tiny room in the Tower of London to vast open seas and uncharted countries. What on earth could that have been like?

  If you read any history at all you find yourself taking sides, favoring one person over another. This is bad for historians, but perfectly acceptable behavior for a writer. I have to count myself as one of Raleigh’s supporters—because he spoke his mind in an age when most people thought it politic to dissemble; because he succeeded at so many different things: courtier, poet, historian, explorer, philosopher; because, perhaps alone among Elizabethan husbands, it seems that he was faithful to his wife.

  Gardner Dozois, who bought this story for Isaac Asimov’s Science Fiction Magazine, had me take out fifteen pages of fairly tedious up-the-Orinoco travelog. If “Infinite Riches” works at all it is at least in part due to him.

  DEATH IS DIFFERENT

  She had her passport stamped and went down the narrow corridor to collect her suitcase. It was almost as if they’d been waiting for her, dozens of them, the women dressed in embroidered shawls and long skirts in primary colors, the men in clothes that had been popular in the United States fifty or sixty years ago.

  “Taxi? Taxi to hotel?”

  “Change money? Yes? Change money?”

  “Jewels, silver, jewels—”

  “Special for you—”

  “Cards, very holy—”

  Monica brushed past them. One very young man, shorter even than she was, grabbed hold of the jacket she had folded over her arm. “Anything, mem,” he said. She turned to look at him. His eyes were wide and earnest. “Anything, I will do anything for you. You do not even have to pay me.”

  She laughed. He drew back, looking hurt, but his hand still held her jacket. “All right,” she said. They were nearly to the wide glass doors leading out into the street. The airport was hot and dry, but the heat coming from the open glass doors was worse. It was almost evening. “Find me a newspaper,” she said.

  He stood a moment. The others had dropped back, as if the young man had staked a claim on her. “A—a newspaper?” he said. He was wearing a gold earring, a five-pointed star, in one ear.

  “Yeah,” she said. Had she ever known the Lurqazi word for newspaper? She looked in her purse for her dictionary and realized she must have packed it in with her luggage. She could only stand there and repeat helplessly, “A newspaper. You know.”

  “Yes. A newspaper.” His eyes lit up, and he pulled her by her jacket outside into the street.

  “Wait—” she said. “My luggage—”

  “A newspaper,” the young man said. “Yes.” He led her to an old man squatting by the road, a pile of newspapers in front of him. At least she supposed they were newspapers. They were written in Lurqazi, a language which used the Roman alphabet but which, she had been told, had no connection with any Indo-European tongue.

  “I meant—Is there an English newspaper?” she asked.

  “English,” he said. He looked defeated.

  “All right,” she said. “How much?” she asked the old man.

  The old man seemed to come alive. “Just one, mem,” he said. “Just one.” His teeth were stained red.

  She gave him a one (she had changed some money at the San Francisco airport), and, as an afterthought, gave the young man a one too. She picked up a paper and turned to the young man. “Could you come back in there with me while I pick up my suitcase?” she said. “I think the horde will descend if you don’t.”

  He looked at her as if he didn’t understand what she’d said, but he followed her inside anyway and waited until she got her suitcase. Then he went back outside with her. She stood a long time watching the cabs—every make and year of car was standing out at the curb, it seemed, including a car she recognized from Czechoslovakia and a horse-drawn carriage—until he guided her toward a late model Volkswagen Rabbit. She had a moment of panic when she thought he was going to get in the car with her, but he just said something to the driver and waved good-bye. The driver, she noticed, was wearing the same five-pointed star earring.

  As they drove to the hotel she felt the familiar travel euphoria, a loosening of the fear of new places she had felt on the plane. She had done it. She was in another place, a place she had never been, ready for new sights and adventures. Nothing untoward had happened to her yet. She was a seasoned traveller.

  She looked out of the car and was startled for a moment to see auto lights flying halfway into the air, buildings standing on nothing. Then she realized she was looking at a reflection in the car’s window. She bent closer to the window, put her hands around her eyes, but she could see nothing real outside, only the flying lights, the phantom buildings.

  At the air-conditioned hotel she kicked off her shoes, took out her dictionary and opened the newspaper. She had studied a little Lurqazi before she’d left the States, but most of the words in the paper were unfamiliar, literary words like “burnished” and “celestial.” She took out a pen and started writing above the lines. After a long time she was pr
etty sure that the right margins of the columns in the paper were ragged not because of some flaw in the printing process but because she was reading poetry. The old man had sold her poetry.

  She laughed and began to unpack, turning on the radio. For a wonder someone was speaking English. She stopped and listened as the announcer said, “—fighting continues in the hills with victory claimed by both sides. In the United States the President pledged support today against what he called Russian-backed guerrillas. The Soviet Union had no comment.

  “The weather continues hot—”

  Something flat and white stuck out from under the shoes in her suitcase, a piece of paper. She pulled it out. “Dear Monica,” she read, “I know this is part of your job but don’t forget your husband who’s waiting for you at home. I know you want to have adventures, but please be careful. See you in two weeks. I love you. I miss you already, and you haven’t even gone yet. Love, Jeremy.”

  The dinner where she’d met Jeremy had been for six couples. On Jeremy’s other side was a small, blond woman. On her other side was a conspicuously empty chair. She must have looked unhappy, because Jeremy introduced himself and asked, in a voice that sounded genuinely worried, if she was all right.

  “I’m fine,” she said brightly. She looked at the empty chair on the other side of her as if it were a person and then turned back to Jeremy. “He said he might be a little late. He does deep sea salvaging.” And then she burst into tears.

  That had been embarrassing enough, but somehow, after he had offered her his napkin and she’d refused it and used hers instead, she found herself telling him the long sad chronology of her love life. The man she was dating had promised to come, she said, but you could never count on him to be anywhere. And the one before that had smuggled drugs, and the one before that had taken her to some kind of religious commune where you weren’t allowed to use electricity and could only bathe once a week, and the one before that had said he was a revolutionary.… His open face was friendly, his green eyes looked concerned. She thought the blond woman on his other side was very lucky. But she could never go out with him, even if the blond woman wasn’t there. He was too … safe.