Navigator

by Baxter, Stephen

  ‘And when they have taken Europe the Chinese will face the Ocean Sea themselves.’ Abdul sat forward, fascinated. ‘I sailed with the Chinese, under their great eunuch admirals. Will they take their turn to explore the Ocean Sea?’

  ‘No,’ said Harry firmly. ‘Not according to the prophecy. Rather, the dangers of the Ocean Sea will come to haunt them ...’

  Even if the Dove did not sail west, other Europeans would surely try the journey, fragile ships from Portugal and Spain and England probing ever deeper beyond the curved horizon. Others, then, would fall on the shores of the western countries - not the empires of Asia, but lands unknown to Europe, said Geoffrey.

  These more tentative explorations would benefit the strange empires of the west more than the Europeans. The Dove would have conquered - or at least he would have set an example of conquest and colonisation, as opposed to reasonably peaceful contact and trade. These more timid explorers would be overwhelmed. The strange oceanic kings would indulge in trade, but in time they would acquire the newcomers’ weapons and ships, take them apart, learn to make their own. They would suffer from plagues brought from Europe, but not in great numbers, and the generations to come would acquire immunity.

  And a western empire, ruled by the ‘plague-hardened’ people of a ‘Feathered Serpent’, would learn of the rich lands across the Ocean Sea.

  ‘They will come,’ said Harry. ‘Pushing across the Ocean Sea, a conquering fleet heading east where the Europeans might have gone west. On the coasts of England, France and Portugal they will fall on an overstretched Chinese empire.’

  Abdul read,

  The Feathered Serpent, plague-hardened,

  Flies over ocean sea,

  Flies east.

  Serpent and Dragon, the mortal duel.

  ‘But the western conquerors will unleash a horror not known in our continent since before the Romans.’

  ‘“And Serpent feasts on holy flesh.”’

  ‘They eat the flesh of humans. They sacrifice human lives in great numbers. Their wars, Geoffrey predicts, will be terrible slave-raids, as captives from across a devastated Europe are hauled to their temples to die under the knives of the priests. Whole populations will be consumed ...

  ‘This, and no more,’ Harry said. ‘The prophecy lets us see no further.’

  Abdul sat as if stunned. Then he got up and paced around the room. He took a bowl of jasmine blossom and breathed deeply of its scent. ‘All this,’ he said at last, ‘if this Dove turns east and not west. But these final lines: “All this I have witnessed / I and my mothers.” What does that mean?’

  ‘Geoffrey says that Eadgyth was not a prophet, not a seer who could see the future, but - a puppet. The words were put into her mouth by a Witness, just as the line says, a saint of the far future - a woman, Eadgyth always believed - who will live at a time of the terrible calamity of the western invasion of the east, or at least fears its likelihood. And this person, wishing to avert the horror, will find a way - well, to speak to a woman of her own deepest past.’

  ‘How?’ Abdul demanded.

  Harry smiled. ‘If I knew that I’d sell it, and wouldn’t be here talking to you. In fact, Geoffrey believes we are dealing with two prophecies here - or two witnessings. He says the Dove was meant to go west. Somebody else found a way to deflect him from his true course - somebody else has already meddled in history, and is trying to send the Dove the wrong way, east, equipped with the Engines of God. And it is a second witness who is now trying to reverse things through the Testament.’

  Abdul thought that over, and laughed. ‘Geoffrey says, Geoffrey says. These scholars are troublesome to men of the world like us. I suppose these Witnesses are scholars too, competing to muck about with history. And now we’re meant to put it all right by packing the Dove off to the west?’

  ‘That’s the idea,’ Harry said unhappily. ‘I suppose the question is, what do we do now?’

  Abdul sat again. ‘I think we have a responsibility, even if the chance of the witnessing coming true is small, to try to avert this huge destructive disaster of the future of Serpent and Dragon. Anything would be better than that.’

  ‘Agreed. So we must do something about it.’

  ‘Yes. But you feel as uncomfortable about this sort of talk as I do, don’t you, Harry?’

  Harry shrugged. ‘I’m just a merchant. I sell wool. That’s all I know.’

  ‘Yes.’ Abdul gazed out of the window, and the dusty evening light caught the planes of his face. ‘And I, I have always been outside the current of the world. I’m happy with that. Happy to observe, not to be involved. I’m content with my role here in the palace. In Granada, I’m trying to resolve problems, Harry. To save people. To restore equilibrium, if you like.’

  ‘Not to change history.’

  ‘Indeed. And yet here we are.’

  Harry nodded. ‘Where do we start?’

  ‘We need to find this Dove of yours,’ Abdul said firmly. ‘For, it seems, all of history turns on his decisions. He must be a navigator, a mariner, a captain, or a ship-owner; he must be seeking sponsorship for his western voyages. These navigators all know each other - and are jealous of each other too. I will see if I can track him down.’

  ‘And then what?’

  ‘Then we will decide what needs to be done to send him on his proper way, off into the Ocean Sea.’ He frowned. ‘It occurs to me - this strange witnessing has fallen into the hands of our family. But families have a way of proliferating. What if there are others, Harry, others out there like you and me, likewise armed with the Testament of Eadgyth - or worse, the Engines of God? And what if one of those other unknown cousins has decided to work the other way - to send the Dove, not west, but east?’

  Harry was appalled; that thought hadn’t occurred to him. ‘If so they will be looking for the Dove, as we are,’ he said.

  ‘True. We must keep our eyes open. And if we encounter them,’ Abdul said calmly, ‘we must deal with them.’ And he pressed his nose to a jasmine petal, as if for comfort.

  XI

  AD 1485

  In the summer of 1485 Grace Bigod, with Friar James in tow, travelled back to Spain. Grace wanted to press her case for the adoption of the Engines of God by the Spanish court.

  But the Spanish were at war. This year, Fernando and Isabel were engaged in the siege of a Moorish town the Christians called Ronda.

  So James and Grace travelled across the country to Ronda with a raiding party of Castilian soldiers. Moving inland from the coast they crossed a landscape of folded hills and flood plains through which rivers snaked, glistening, and fortified towns sat squat on the hilltops. The scars of the monarchs’ war were everywhere, in the burned-out fields, the hulks of abandoned farmhouses, the stinking carcasses littering the roadsides.

  The knights called themselves caballeros, and they were attended by hidalgos, lesser nobles. As they rode they joked, sang and drank. James thought they had a certain lazy arrogance. If they saw a stone wall standing they would run their horses at it to knock it down, if they saw a haystack they would torch it, if they saw a well they would throw stones down it to block it up, if they saw an irrigation channel they would dam it with dead cattle. With their crusaders’ crosses stitched to their sleeves they dedicated each new bit of destruction to Saint James the Moorslayer, and they dreamed of what they would do if they found a few plump Moorish women hiding out in the ruins. Thus they wrecked a landscape that had been intensively farmed for seven centuries.

  Grace had no sympathy for James’s unease at all this. ‘You’re a hypocrite,’ she said bluntly. ‘You gladly devote your pious, pointless little life to the development of devastating weapons. And yet you flinch when you see the results.’

  James faced his conscience, and he knew she was right. He had had no choice about being assigned by his abbot to the engines project. But he was thirty years old now, and as the years had worn away he had become engaged in the intellectual exercise of the engines for its own challeng
e. It was thrilling to see these most remarkable toys emerge from heaps of wood and iron, saltpetre, sulphur and carbon - a thrill, his confessor warned him, that might be a compensation for other aspects of his life that he had piously put aside.

  But he had, he realised, built a wall in his mind between the development of the engines and their ultimate purpose.

  He said unhappily, ‘It’s just that I didn’t expect it to be like this.’ He waved a hand. ‘Is this war? This wanton destruction of property - there will be famine here in the winter - this savagery inflicted on the old and the ill, on women and children.’

  She laughed at him. ‘What did you expect, chivalry? You ought to read a little more widely, brother. This is the way wars are fought now: French against Flemish, Italian against Italian, Moor against Christian ... Why, we English pioneered the technique, in our long war with the French. You cut off your enemy at the knees by removing his food supply, by shocking his population into terror and submission. There’s even a word for it, I’m told: chevauchée. Wars are fought like this all over Europe now, like it or not.

  ‘So pray for the souls of the dead children, friar. But remember that the Pope himself says that a war for Christ is a just war, however it’s fought. And pray that you’re never on the losing side.’

  She was a hard, brutal woman. And though she must be near fifty now, the angry lust she had so carelessly stirred in him still flickered. She had made a peculiar enemy of him by the way she had treated him, he thought. He tried to conceal this from her. And he tried to dismiss from his own mind the thoughts he had of her, fantasies of lust and violence, in which he ended her domination of him once and for all.

  After days on the road, they arrived at Ronda.

  The port of Malaga was the Christians’ next strategic objective, as it had been for two years, but its twin fortresses stood strong and stubborn under the command of the formidable El Zagal, and the Christians did not yet have the resources to deal with it. So they had focused their energies on destroying this town, Ronda, thirty miles inland and sixty miles west of Malaga, the key to the western defence of the residual Moorish state.

  The site was extraordinary. Ronda sat on top of a butte, a pillar of rock. To the north was a steep-walled gorge. To the south the butte was lower, and here the Moors had built a massive fortification, a curtain wall studded by towers. The only way into the town was by a bridge that spanned the gorge to the north. James, studying this place, thought it was a textbook example of a natural fortress, a definition of impregnability. No wonder the Romans, those great military technicians, had settled here.

  But the monarchs of Spain were here to take it, and the siege was laid.

  The Christian camp, out of range of the Moorish defenders’ cannons, arquebuses and crossbows, was a morass of mud and tents and stinking cesspits, over which a loose cloud of greasy smoke hung day and night. But as they approached, James saw with a helpless thrill that the banners of the monarchs hung over the camp. Fernando and Isabel, the modem champions of Christendom, really were here in person, not half a mile from where James and Grace pitched their own rough leather tent.

  But this place of war was not comfortable.

  When night fell great cannon began to roar. On the south side of the city, targeting the walls and towers, Fernando had drawn up a battery of immense new Italian guns called bombards. Their unceasing thunder was overwhelming, and the night was a hellish scene of half-naked men, blistered from the heat of the weapons, labouring amid a stink of gunpowder and smoke to load, aim and fire, over and over, the shot gradually battering down the city walls.

  And as the day broke the Moors attacked - but they came from the hills, not from the city. James learned that these were the forces of the governor of Ronda. An experienced general called Hamet el Zegri, he had allowed himself to be lured out of his city to raid Christian fields and barns, a revenge for the chevauchée of his countryside. But the Christians had sent a cavalry detachment to cut him off from Ronda, and when el Zegri returned he found his town already besieged.

  Still, under el Zegri’s command the Moors came riding down from their hills, every day. The armies closed amid a roar of cannon and the popping of arquebuses and a clamour of war drums, and to cries of ‘For Saint James!’ and ‘Allah akbar!’ When the Christians mounted attacks, the Moorish would kneel in blocks, their pikes at the ready, soaking up the charges, their javelins in quivers to be flung with deadly skill. And the Moorish cavalry, lightly armoured, riding fast under their colourful battle flags, was much more mobile than the Christian knights in their heavier chain-mail and plate.

  For all the bustle and excitement of the cavalry charges and the spectacle of the cannon and arquebuses, the real work of killing was done, as it had always been, with pikes and swords and scimitars, wielded by human muscle, one man against another. James was appalled by the utter, fully committed violence of these encounters, even though none of them was conclusive. Isabel had set aside tents to serve as hospitals, but they were overrun, and if you went to that part of the camp the groans of the dying and the stink of rotting flesh were unbearable.

  For four nights the bombardment continued, and for four days the Moors attacked. James didn’t sleep for a single hour. It was a time of utter misery, for besieged and besiegers. In the Christian camp, the supply lines to Cordoba were fragile, and all there was to eat was a disgusting mixture of flour in pork fat.

  Relief came when the last of Ronda’s towers was demolished, and the walls crumbled. James stood beside the silent bombards, watching the end game of the siege as the caballeros swarmed into the city, and the screams began.

  XII

  A week after the Moors’ capitulation, James and Grace were able to enter Ronda.

  Walking in from the Christian army camp they passed a complex of buildings, arched roofs and domes, sheltering in the lee of the smashed city walls. It turned out to be a bathhouse; a marshy, steamy stink lingered in the air around it. The baths were working; on a squat tower the donkey patiently turned its wheel, watched by a Moorish boy with a switch, drawing up river-water to be fed via a slender aqueduct into the baths. Today the men who filed through its rooms were Christian soldiers, but the women who went with them were all Moorish. James wondered how many of them had a choice.

  James and Grace made their way over the bridge across the gorge. The bridge was battered, but it had survived the bombardment. The gorge’s walls loomed above them, and James peered up curiously. The limestone was cracked vertically and horizontally, heaped up in tremendous blocks as big as houses.

  They clambered up steep cobbled paths into the city itself. Squeezed onto its table-top of rock and hemmed in by its walls, Ronda was cramped and crammed. The bombards’ shot had created great splashes of shattered stone, as if immense raindrops had fallen from the sky. There was a prevailing stink of rot and raw sewage, even a week after the water supply had been restored. Soldiers worked, picking through the rubble, searching for bodies, pocketing anything worth stealing. No Moors were about. The soldiers said that everybody was either dead, fled or hiding.

  With Grace leading the way they cut through the centre of the town, heading for the cliffs on the north-western side. The warren of streets was studded with fine houses, mosques and bazaars.

  They came at last to the western boundary of the city, where the town simply came to an abrupt end, for the plateau on which it had been built fell away in columnar limestone cliffs. James looked down over a flood plain, a land of farms and orchards through which a river snaked lazily. It was all so far below him it was like staring down at a vast map. But much of the land was brown or black, the crops and trees burned out, and sluggish threads of smoke rose to pollute the heavy air.

  And as he reached the very edge of the cliff James stepped into an updraught of warm air, blowing strongly from the ground below. Down there in the valley a breeze was blowing, but when it reached the vertical cliff face the moving air, with nowhere else to go, washed upwards in an un
ending invisible stream to ruffle the cloak of a curious English friar. For a heartbeat he was able to lose himself in simple wonder at this unexpected physical phenomenon, a fragment of the rich beauty of God’s creation.

  Then Grace plucked at his arm. ‘Look,’ she said. ‘Haven’t you heard the cheering? There she is ...’

  Reluctantly he turned, and immersed himself once more in the affairs of men.

  A procession was approaching, advancing along the broad road that lined the cliff: gilded people, merchants and courtiers, senior military men dressed up like peacocks, a splash of Christian colour in this conquered Moorish town. Many of them had crusaders’ crosses exquisitely stitched to their shoulders or breasts. There were some Moors in the group, grandly dressed themselves with their jewelled turbans glinting: the rich and powerful under the old regime, he supposed, now hoping to keep their wealth and influence under the town’s change of ownership.

  At the head of the procession, walking slowly, was a black knot of prelates, somehow sinister in their darkness. And at the heart of this group, shining in a gown of bright colourful silks, was a tall, imposing woman, her features strong, her eyes chips of aquamarine. Her chestnut brown hair was tied back under a small, delicate turban, for when she entered a conquered town she had a custom of dressing respectfully, with a nod to the Moorish style.

  It was the Queen, of course, Isabel of Castile. As she passed her soldiers cheered.

  ‘Magnificent, isn’t she?’

  Diego Ferron had joined them. The Dominican friar, tall and wire-thin, wore a robe so black it seemed to suck the daylight out of the air.

  With him was a Moor, a portly man of about fifty with an expressionless, weather-beaten face. He carried a sheaf of documents under one arm, and he waited, eyes empty, at Ferron’s side.

  Grace took Ferron’s hand and kissed it. ‘My good friar. You found me, I’m so glad.’