Pastwatch: The Redemption Of Christopher Columbus

by Orson Scott Card

  At long last the interview ended. Isabella, always careful, promised nothing, but Santangel could see how her eyes shone. "We will speak again," she said.

  I think not, thought Santangel. I think Ferdinand will want to keep direct contact between his wife and this Genovese to a minimum. But she will not forget him, and even though at this moment the treasury can afford nothing beyond the war, if Columbus is patient enough and does nothing stupid, I think Isabella will find a way to give him a chance.

  A chance for what? To die at sea, lost with three caravels and all their crews, starving or dying of thirst or broken up in some storm or swallowed up in a maelstrom?

  Columbus was dismissed. Isabella, weary but happy, sank back in her throne, then beckoned to Quintanilla and Cardinal Mendoza, both of whom had also waited through the interview. To Santangel's surprise, she also beckoned to him.

  "What do you think of this man?" she asked.

  Quintanilla, always the ftrst to speak and the last to have anything valuable to say, merely shrugged. "Who can tell whether his plan has merit?"

  Cardinal Mendoza, the man that some called "the third king," smiled. "He speaks well, Your Majesty, and he has sailed with the Portuguese and met with their king," he said. "But it will take much examination before we know whether his ideas have merit. I think his idea of the distance between Spain and Cathay, sailing west, is grossly wrong."

  Then she looked at Santangel. This terrified him. He had not won his position of trust because he spoke up in the presence of others. He was not a speaker. Rather he acted. The King trusted him because when he promised he could raise a sum of money, he produced it; when he promised they could afford to carry out a campaign, the funds were there.

  "What do I know of such matters, Your Majesty?" he asked. "Sailing west -- what do I know of that?"

  "What will you tell my husband?" she asked -- teasingly, for of course he was an open observer, not a spy.

  "That Columbus's plan is not as expensive as a siege, but more expensive than anything we can afford at present."

  She turned to Quintanilla. "And can Castile not afford it, either?"

  "At present, Your Majesty, " said Quintanilla, "it would be difficult. Not impossible, but if it failed it would make Castile look foolish in the eyes of others."

  No need to say that the "others" he referred to were Ferdinand and his advisers. Santangel knew that Isabella was always careful to retain the respect of her husband and the men he listened to, for if she gained a reputation for foolishness, it would be an easy matter for him to step in and take over more and more of her power in Castile with little resistance from the Castilian lords. Only her reputation for "manlike" wisdom allowed her to remain a strong rallying point for the Castilians, which in turn gave her a measure of independence from her husband.

  "And yet," she said, "why did God make us queen, if not to bring his children to the Cross?"

  Cardinal Mendoza nodded. "If his ideas have merit, then pursuing them would be worth any sacrifice, Your Majesty," he said.

  "So let us keep him here with the court, so he can be examined, so his ideas can be discussed and compared to the knowledge we have from the ancients. There's no hurry, I think. Cathay will still be there in a month or two, or a year."

  Isabella thought for a few moments. "The man has no estate," she said. "If we keep him here, then we must attach him to the court." She looked at Quintanilla. "He must be allowed to live as a gentleman."

  He nodded. "I already gave him a small sum to keep him while he waited for this audience."

  "Fifteen thousand maravedis out of my own purse," said the Queen.

  "That is for the year, Your Majesty?"

  "If it takes more than a year," she said, "we'll speak of this again." She waved her hand and looked away. Quintanilla left. Cardinal Mendoza also excused himself and took his leave. Santangel turned to go, but she called him back. "Luis," she said.

  "Your Majesty."

  She waited until Cardinal Mendoza had gone. "How extraordinary, that Cardinal Mendoza chose to listen to all that Columbus had to say."

  "He's a remarkable man," said Santangel.

  "Which? Columbus or Mendoza?"

  Since Santangel wasn't sure himself, he had no ready answer.

  "You heard him, Luis Santangel, and you are a hardheaded man. What do you think of him?"

  "I believe him to be an honest man," said Santangel. "Beyond that, who can know? Oceans and sailing vessels and kingdoms of the east -- I know nothing of that."

  "But you do know how to judge whether a man is honest."

  "He's not here to steal from the royal coffers," said Santangel. "And he meant every word that he said to you today. Of that I'm certain, Your Majesty."

  "I am, too," said the Queen. "I hope he is able to make his case to the scholars."

  Santangel nodded. And then, against his better judgment, he added a rather daring comment. "Scholars don't know everything, Your Majesty."

  She raised her eyebrows. Then she smiled. "He won you over, too, did he?"

  Santangel blushed. "As I said -- I think him an honest man."

  "Honest men don't know everything either," she said.

  "In my line of work, Your Majesty, I have come to think of honest men as a precious rarity, while scholars are rather thick on the ground."

  "And is that what you will tell my husband?"

  "Your husband," he said carefully, "will not ask me the same questions that you asked."

  "Then he will end up knowing less than he should know, don't you think?"

  It was as close as Queen Isabella could come to openly admitting the rivalry between the two crowns of Spain, despite the careful harmony of their marriage. It would not do for Santangel to commit himself on such a dangerous question. "I cannot begin to guess what sovereigns should know."

  "Neither can I, " said the Queen softly. She looked away, a sort of melancholy drifting across her face. "It won't do for me to see him too often," she murmured. Then, as if remembering Santangel was there, she waved him off.

  He left at once, but her words lingered. It won't do for me to see him too often. So, Columbus had struck deeper than he knew. Well, that was something the King didn't need to hear about. No reason to tell the King something that would lead to the poor Genovese dying on some dark night with a dirk between his ribs. Santangel would tell King Ferdinand only that what King Ferdinand would ask: Did Columbus's idea seem worth the cost? And to that, Santangel would answer honestly that at present it was more than the Crown could afford, but at some later date, with the war successfully concluded, it might be both feasible and desirable, if it were judged to have any chance at all of success.

  And in the meantime, there was no need to worry about the Queen's last remark. She was a Christian woman and a clever queen. She would not jeopardize her place in eternity or on the throne for the sake of some brief yearning for this white-haired Genovese; nor did Columbus seem such a fool as to seek that dangerous avenue of preferment. Yet Santangel wondered if, in the back of Columbus's mind, there might not be some small hope of winning more than the mere approval of the Queen.

  Well, what would it matter? It would come to nothing. If Santangel was any judge of men, he was certain that Cardinal Mendoza had left the court tonight determined to see to it that Columbus's examination would be hellish. The poor man's arguments would end up in shreds; after the scholars were through with him he would no doubt slink away from Cordoba in shame.

  Too bad, thought Santangel. He made such an excellent start.

  And then he thought: I want him to succeed. I want him to have his ships and make his voyage. What has he done to me? Why should I care? Columbus has seduced me as surely as he seduced the Queen.

  He shuddered at his own fragility. He had thought he was a stronger man than that.

  * * *

  It was obvious to Hunahpu from the beginning that Kemal was annoyed at having to waste time listening to this unknown child from Mexico. He
was cold and impatient. But Tagiri and Hassan were pleasant enough, and when Hunahpu looked to Diko he could see that she was perfectly at ease, and her smile was warm and encouraging. Perhaps Kemal was always like this. Well, no matter, thought Hunahpu. What mattered was the truth, and Hunahpu had that, or at least more of it than anyone else had put together yet about these matters.

  It took an hour to get through all that he had shown to Diko in half that time, mostly because Kemal kept interrupting at first, challenging Hunahpu's statements. But as time went on, as it became clear that all of Kemal's challenges were easily dealt with using evidence that Hunahpu had already intended to include a bit later in his presentation, the hostility began to slacken, and he was allowed to proceed with fewer questions.

  Now he had reached the end of the things that Diko had seen, and as if to signal that fact, she pulled her chair closer to the TruSite viewing area. The others who had watched yesterday also grew more attentive. "I have shown you that the Tarascans had the technology to establish a more dominant empire than the Mexica, and the Tlaxcalans were reaching for that technology. Their struggle for survival had made them more willing to embrace novelty -- which we saw a bit later, of course, when they made alliance with Cortes. But this wasn't all. The Zapotecs of the northern coast of the Isthmus of Tehuantepec were also developing a new technology."

  The TruSite II at once began displaying shipbuilders at work. Hunahpu showed them the standard ocean-going kanoa of the Tainos and Caribs of the islands to the east, then the differences in the new ships that the Zapotecs were building. "Rudders," he said, and they could see that the tiller was indeed being transformed into the more efficient steering device. "And now," he said, "look how they're making the ships larger."

  Sure enough, the Zapotecs were reaching for a greater carrying capacity than would ever be possible in a dugout canoe made from a single tree. At first it consisted of wide decks straddling the sides of the canoe and reaching beyond, but this became unwieldy, making the boat too likely to tip. A better solution was to shape a second tree into a vertical extension of the sides of the canoe, lashed to the hull by the use of holes bored into the sides. To make it watertight they smeared the surfaces with sap before they put them together, making a glue-like bond when it was lashed tight.

  "Clever," said Kemal.

  "It doubles the carrying capacity of the ships. But it slows them down, too -- they tend to wallow in the water. What matters, though, is that they've learned to join wood and make it watertight. Single-tree construction is over. It's just a matter of time before the original one-tree canoe becomes the keel, and planks are used to make a much wider, shallower hull."

  "A matter of time," said Kemal. "But you don't actually see any being made."

  "What they lack is adequate tools," said Hunahpu. "When Tlaxcala takes over the Aztec empire, the bronze of the Tarascans will come to the Zapotecs, and they'll be able to make boards more efficiently and with more reliably smooth surfaces. The point is that when they make any innovation, it spreads quickly. And the Zapotecs are also under pressure from the Aztecs. They have to find sources of supply because the Mexican armies have forced them from their fields. In this swampy land, farming is always precarious. So look where they're sailing."

  He showed them the clumsy, wallowing Zapotec ships carrying large cargos from Veracruz and the Yucatan. "Slow as these ships are, they carry enough cargo on each trip to make the voyages profitable. They're far enough up the coast of Veracruz now to be in contact with the Tlaxcalans; and the Tarascans. And here." Again the view changed. "This is the island of Hispaniola. And look who's coming to visit."

  Three Zapotecan ships slipped up to the shore.

  "Unfortunately," said Hunahpu, "Columbus was already there."

  "But if he hadn't been there," said Diko, "it could have extended the reach of a Tlaxcalan empire out to the islands."

  "Exactly," said Hunahpu.

  "There was already extensive contact between Mesoamerica and the Caribbean islands," said Kemal.

  "Of course," said Hunahpu. "The Taino culture was actually an overlay by earlier raiders from the Yucatan. They brought the ball court with them, for instance, and established themselves as the ruling class. But they adopted the Arawak language and soon forgot their origins, and they certainly did not establish regular trade routes. Why should they? The boats didn't carry enough to make trade profitable. Only raiding was worth the effort, and the Caribs were the raiders, not the Taino, and since they came out of the southeastern Caribbean, Mesoamerica was even further out of reach. The Taino knew about Mesoamerica as a fabled land of gold and wealth and mighty gods -- that's what they meant when they kept telling Columbus that the land of gold was to the west -- but they had no regular contact. These Zapotecan ships would have changed all that. Especially as the ships got bigger and better. It would have been the beginning of a sailing tradition that would have led to ships that could cross the Atlantic.

  "Very speculative," said Kemal.

  "Forgive me," said Diko, "but isn't that what your entire project is? Speculation?"

  Kemal glowered at her.

  "What matters," said Hunahpu, anxious not to antagonize Kemal, "is not the details. What matters is that the Zapotecs were innovating, they reached the islands with ships that could carry larger cargos, and they were also a familiar sight to the Tlaxcalans along the coast of Veracruz. It's unthinkable that the Tlaxcalans would not have seized upon this new technology just as they reached for the bronze-working of the Tarascans. It was an age of invention and innovation in Mesoamerica, and the only barrier was the ultraconservative Mexica leadership. That was doomed -- everyone knows it -- and it seems obvious to me from this evidence that the Tlaxcalans would have become the successor empire, and as the Persians far outstripped the empire of the Chaldeans, so also the innovative, politically sophisticated Tlaxcalan empire would have outreached the empire of the Mexica."

  "You've made that case very well," said Kemal.

  Hunahpu almost allowed himself a sigh of relief.

  "But you have claimed much more than that, haven't you? And for those claims you have no evidence."

  "Columbus's discovery erased all the other evidence," said Hunahpu. "But then, the Intervention also erased Columbus's crusade to the east. I think we're on equal ground here."

  "Equally shaky," said Kemal.

  "Kemal is heading the speculative aspects of our research," said Tagiri, "precisely because he is profoundly skeptical about it. He doesn't believe an accurate reconstruction is possible."

  That thought had never occurred to Hunahpu -- that Kemal was predisposed to reject all speculations. He had assumed that his only task was to bring Kemal to consider another possible scenario, not that he had to persuade him that it was possible to construct a scenario at all.

  Diko seemed to sense his consternation. "Hunahpu," she said, "let's leave aside the issue of what can and can't be proved. You must have developed the rest of the story in your mind. Let's regard it as likely that Tlaxcala has conquered and unified the whole of the old Mexica empire, and that now it's running smoothly with Zapotecan ships trading far and wide and Tarascan bronzeworkers making weapons and tools for them. What then?"

  Her guidance helped him recover his confidence. Trying to convince the great Kemal against his will was too much to contemplate; talking about ideas he could do. "First, you have to remember," said Hunahpu, "that there was one problem of the Mexica that the Tlaxcalans had not overcome. As with the Mexica, the Tlaxcalan practice of wholesale sacrifice to their bloodthirsty god would have drained away the manpower they needed to feed their population."

  "So? How do you resolve it?" asked Kemal. "You wouldn't have come here if you didn't have an answer."

  "I have a possibility, anyway. There's nothing in the evidence, because Tlaxcala hadn't had to govern a real empire yet. But they couldn't have succeeded if they made the same mistake the Mexica made, slaughtering the able-bodied men of their subject populatio
ns. So here's how I think they would have solved it. There is a hint of a doctrine among the priestly class that their warrior god Camaxtli becomes especially thirsty for blood after he has exerted himself to give Tlaxcala a victory. The existence of this idea makes it possible for the Tlaxcalans to evolve the practice of only offering huge mass sacrifices after a military victory, because that's the only time that Camaxtli is especially in need of blood. So if a city or nation or tribe willingly allies itself with Tlaxcala, submits to their overlordship, and allows the Tlaxcalan bureaucracy to administer their affairs, then instead of being sacrificed, their men are left to work the fields. Perhaps, if they prove to be trustworthy, they can even join the Tlaxcalan army, or fight alongside it. The mass sacrifices are only performed using captives from armies that resist. Aside from that, peacetime sacrifices in the Tlaxcalan empire would stay at a tolerable level -- the way they were before the Mexica arose to form the Aztec empire in the first place."

  "It gives the surrounding nations a reward for surrendering," said Hassan. "And a reason not to rebel."

  "Just the way so much of the Roman Empire didn't have to be conquered," said Hunahpu. "The Romans seemed so irresistible that kings of neighboring countries would make the Roman senate the heir to their thrones, so that they could live as sovereigns until they died, and then their kingdoms would pass peacefully into the Roman system. It's the cheapest way to build an empire, and the best, since there's no war damage to the newly acquired lands."

  "So," said Kemal. "If their god isn't bloodthirsty except after victory, they become peaceful and their god goes to sleep."

  "Well, that would be nice," said Hunahpu, "but part of their theology was that besides needing sacrifices after victory, Camaxtli liked the blood. Camaxtli liked war. So they could put off the huge sacrifices until they won a victory, but they would still keep looking for more fights that might lead to such a victory. Besides, the Tlaxcalans had the same social-mobility system as the Mexica in their pre-Moctezuma days. The only way to rise within their society was either to make a lot of money or to prevail in battle. And making money was only possible for those who controlled trade. So there would have been constant pressure to start new wars with ever-more-remote neighbors. I think it wouldn't have taken the bronze-wielding Tlaxcalans long to reach the natural boundaries of their new seafaring empire: The Caribbean islands to the east, the mountains of Colombia to the south, and the deserts to the north. Conquests beyond those boundaries would not have been cost-effective, either because there were no large concentrated populations to exploit economically or to offer as sacrifices, or because the resistance would have been too strong as they came in contact with the Incas."