Journey of Strangers

by Elizabeth Zelvin

  “Then you still wish to be a kira?”

  “I do,” Rachel said firmly.

  The next day, when they reached the gates of the palace, grim-faced janissaries stopped them.

  “You cannot go in today,” their captain said. “Our master’s favorite, Seyhan Hatun, has died. The palace is in mourning.”

  That evening, she poured the whole tale out to Ümīt, sobbing by the time she reached the end. He put his arms around her and let her cry upon his shoulder.

  “She was vain and silly,” Rachel said, “but she did not deserve to die, nor did her baby. That I had an unwitting part in it is a burden I must bear.”

  “I am glad you have allowed me to share it, sweetheart,” Ümīt said, rocking her back and forth. “It is a great burden, but I agree that you can do nothing but bear it in silence. Any other course would be disastrous. Are you sure that you still wish to be a kira?”

  “Yes,” she said. “Kira Chana asked me the same, and I have been thinking ever since about why. I cannot be nothing but a Jewish wife, whether my husband be Jewish or Muslim. I must have occupation. I must have purpose. Ha’shem has given these ladies into my charge, if it does not sound puffed up so say so.”

  “It does not, nanichi,” Ümīt said. “I understand you perfectly. God has shown you that by serving them, you increase matu’m.”

  “Exactly,” Rachel said. “It is so comforting to know you see it just as I do. And if I continue to serve them, perhaps Ha’shem will show me how I may do them good to make up for the harm I have done.”

  “Inşallah,” Ümīt said.

  “Im yirtzah Ha’shem,” Rachel said. “I knew you would understand.”

  Part Three

  The Pillars of Hercules

  Chapter 39: Diego

  Esperanza skimmed through the water, the rowers’ strokes commanding the waves as the long oars rose and fell in unison. The oarsmen’s arms, burnished with sweat and sun, pulled and thrust in an unvarying rhythm. At the tiller, the Moorish helmsman kept them in time by singing a nasal, hypnotic tune that evoked lost Andalusia. Two nimble Tunisian sailors, cousins of Amir’s, held stations at the foremast, tending the single sail we used when under oars. An Anatolian sailor from Amir’s rescue mission to the Iberian coast balanced on the bowsprit, calling out our depth and speed. We had a smooth sea and a light wind, perfect conditions for the little galliotçik, as the men had taken to calling her.

  I had always delighted in being under sail. I remembered vividly my first days on the Santa Maria, when I had discovered the sanctuary of the crow’s nest and climbed the rigging whenever I could to feel the wind in my face and praise Adonai out loud. This was a different but equal joy. As captain of the vessel, I could go where I would. Amir and I had agreed to alternate command between one watch and the next. But we found that we worked together in such amity that we could share responsibility without keeping to an inflexible schedule.

  I had loved every vessel I had shipped in: the homely Santa Maria, elegant Mariagalante, and the staunch little Niña. But Esperanza was mine, and I loved every plank and yard of cable of her being. We had not dared to fashion her with the long beak of a Turkish galley, for fear she would prove too recognizable as of Ottoman make, tempting to the Christian corsairs who patrolled the western Mediterranean and alarming to the Portuguese we might encounter off the coast of Africa. But I loved to stand upon the prow with the wind in my face and only sea and sky between me and the horizon. My mind was usually busy with the day’s duties, the vessel’s course, the men’s comfort, the weather, and the need to be alert to the slightest possibility of danger in the form of other ships, whether Ottoman or Venetian or vessels of the Knights of Rhodes. But by forcing myself not to think too far ahead, not allowing myself to worry, as Rachel would put it, beyond the day’s compass, I found a peace that had eluded me in Istanbul.

  We ate well, for there was nothing to stop us from resting the oars and dropping anchor to cast our nets at will. Several of the sailors were Turks drawn from the fishing fleet of which Amir was part owner. Our cook was Greek, well versed in preparing the sweet-fleshed fish of the Mediterranean: lavraki, which the Turks called levrek, red barbounia, and the tiny silver sardeles. Once we reached the deep waters off the coast of Africa, we would not be sure of fresh food, so for the moment, we enjoyed the fish, glistening with oil and redolent of dried herbs, that he produced our cramped shipboard conditions.

  Most of the crew were Muslim, so we carried no wine or spirits, a great saving in space and a source of relief in terms of discipline. Nor did our provisions include salt pork, which it had so taxed my ingenuity to find excuses not to eat on the Admiral’s ships. We carried a good supply of salt beef and dried peas, and I had found a Jewish baker in Istanbul willing to make us a great quantity of ship’s biscuit, that tasteless but durable staple of seamen’s fare. I found that Amir shared my belief in the efficacy of oranges and lemons to prevent tooth rot. We insisted that all the men partake of them and replenished our supplies at every port.

  “What if an infidel corsair seeks to board us?” Amir snapped at one of the Tunisians, who had complained that lemons puckered his mouth. “Or fires a broadside at us? How much use do you think you will be if you are howling with the toothache? You are my cousin, but I am your captain, and do not forget it. Now will you eat a lemon, or must I force it down your skinny throat?”

  “You’d better obey the captain, Saláh,” advised another cousin, “or next time it will be an orange up your backside.”

  “That will do,” Amir said with what dignity he could muster, since all the men within earshot were snickering and even I had trouble repressing a smile.

  In reality, Amir ruled the crew with firmness, charm, and a gift for inspiring loyalty. Indeed, they followed him blindly, because he had persuaded me not to tell them at the outset where we were going and why.

  “That is how it was when we got the Jews out of Spain,” he said. “If they had known, they would have had opinions, which are all very well in a court of law but not on board my ship.”

  “I wish I had your gift for command,” I said to him one day as we watched a school of dolphins at play in Esperanza’s wake.

  “Do you not know how much the men admire you?” Amir asked.

  “What do you mean?”

  “They admire your fortitude and your legendary travels,” he said. “Besides, they think you are more intelligent than I.”

  “What gives them that idea?”

  “You understand their needs to the last dried pea in the hold. You speak more languages than I. You are always reading or writing, which impresses them greatly. I am not sure that, did we both fall overboard, they might not rescue you ahead of me.”

  “You must tell them to save you first,” I said. “For I can swim, and you cannot.”

  In short, I was happy.

  For the first few weeks of the voyage, we remained in Ottoman waters. We stopped to augment our provisions in Izmir, which the Greeks called Smyrna, and again in Athens. This route had the advantage of keeping us clear of Rhodes. Once we passed between the southern coast of Greece and the isle of Crete, which was ruled by Venice, we entered the broadest reach of the eastern Mediterranean. We took care to keep closer to the Maghreb than to the Italian shore. We passed Venetian ships, both galleys and round ships. The Ottomans were not currently at war with Venice. Still, we always heaved a sigh of relief when they had gone on their way.

  “In two or three years,” Amir said, “it may be a different story. The sultan and Venice both have empires. They wish to expand, and they seek ever greater trading opportunities in the east, since your Spaniards seem set to gobble up the lands of gold to the west.”

  “They are not my Spaniards,” I said with a grimace of distaste. “What about the Portuguese?”

  “The Portuguese are determined to find a spice route to the Indies by sea around the tip of Africa,” Amir said. “Do you not think they too will seek gold to the west, be
low that imaginary line the Christians have drawn? But their real trade is slaves. We will have to beware of slavers between Gibraltar and São Tomé. It is an ugly business.”

  “I have seen that ugliness at first hand,” I said, thinking of the wretched Taino.

  “And I have lived it,” Amir said.

  “We have been lucky,” I said presently, “to have time to test the ship’s mettle and to forge the crew into an admirable working team.”

  “The true challenge will begin,” Amir said, “as we pass Malta and approach the Strait of Sicily, which marks the gateway to the western Mediterranean.”

  “Before we reach that point,” I said, “let us send a pigeon back to Istanbul to reassure our loved ones that all is well, while we can still say with sincerity that so far, nothing has gone wrong.”

  Rachel and Ümīt had insisted that they would await my safe return before they married. I had protested in vain.

  “What if I never return?” I asked. “You cannot wait for me, denying yourselves, year after year. Let us set a term, not to despair of my safety but simply to accept that you must hold the wedding without me. Surely six months will be delay enough.”

  Rachel and Ümīt exchanged glances, consulting each other without words as had become more and more their habit. Then Ümīt nodded.

  “We will wait for a year,” Rachel said.

  “It is too much!”

  “It is not enough,” Rachel said, “but we will compromise to please you. And we will pray for you every day.”

  “To both Adonai and Allah,” Ümīt added.

  The worst mishap we had between Istanbul and Malta was that Amir’s cousin Saláh, who was charged with feeding the pigeons their daily allotment of millet, carelessly left the door to their cage unlatched one evening, and by the time it was discovered, a number of pigeons had escaped. I added several curses I had never heard before to my Turkish and Arabic vocabulary as Amir examined each of the remaining pigeons’ coded leg bands to determine the destinations toward which the escapees were winging their way with empty message tubes. Saláh was in his bad graces for a week afterward. The Tunisian also had to endure the teasing of his fellows, as his punishment was to swab Esperanza’s already spotless deck. The sailors, almost as fond of the gallant little ship as Amir and I, kept her groomed like a prize filly.

  “We will put in at Tunis,” Amir said, once he had finished taking inventory of the remaining pigeons. “Luckily, the second home of one of the remaining birds is my grandfather’s rooftop. But if we are pursued by corsairs as we near Gibraltar and must hide in the coves and ruins of Algeciras, we will have no way of summoning help. I can only hope that my kin there will not read the arrival of pigeons bearing no messages as a sign that I have met with disaster. They know that if my ship were ever boarded or sunk, I would free the pigeons rather than see them drown or, for that matter, be eaten by my enemies.”

  “And the birds that remember only Istanbul?” I asked.

  “Five of them remain,” he said. “We will still be able to send a message home.”

  It occurred to me that we might reassure Amir’s kin in Algeciras by telling his family to send a pigeon from Istanbul explaining the mishap. But considering that our journey had barely begun, it would not do much good to report that we were safe. By the time the pigeon bearing such a message arrived, it might well no longer be true.

  Chapter 40: Joanna

  They called the huddle of huts in the dusty clearing the encampment to distinguish it from the Portuguese settlement. The muddy spring in the forest was close by. Joanna liked being the one to fetch the brimming buckets of water for common use, especially when the encampment baked in the midday sun. It gave her a precious moment of solitude and a chance to bathe her feet. It was always cool in the forest. Joanna was taller than Yenenga now, strong enough to spend hours pounding manioc for what the African woman called foutou. Her arms were ropy with muscle from hoisting the heavy pestle and slamming it down to crush the tubers, bland but filling, that formed an important part of their diet.

  Joanna had struggled to survive alone when she had first escaped. She had had to claw her way upward through the slopes of the thick, tangled forest to find the spring. She had lived on bananas and berries, discovering by trial and error which made her sick and which were edible. Yenenga had been the first to join her, still carrying the bloody knife with which she had killed the Portuguese master who had committed one outrage too many on her body. Yenenga had shown her how to dig roots from the earth and prepare the poisonous ones to make them safe to eat. She had helped Joanna fashion spears and taught her how to lure and skin the small animals of the forest. She had shown her how to turn a rotted log and eat the grubs and insects on its underside. For coconuts and fish, they made their way down to the coast. Yenenga could make nets and baskets from the vines of the forest and the leaves of the palm trees. Joanna’s baskets were neither as beautiful nor as tightly woven, but they served. She was already adept at climbing the tall, prickly trunk of a coconut palm and shaking or cutting down the fruit, with its crunchy white flesh and its heart of sweet, milky juice. They had trapped a pregnant sow that had wandered far from the Povoação, and now they had a growing herd of pigs, half feral but too lazy not to be caught at need. Joanna had grown accustomed to eating pork. She no longer feared that Adonai might smite her for doing so. Meat gave her strength, and she thought God owed her a dispensation.

  Unlike Joanna, Yenenga had not been wandering blindly in the forest.

  “I follow your track,” she said, grinning broadly as she displayed the treasures she had brought: an axe, a coil of bowstrings, extra flints, a precious package of salt. “Not hard—for me. No fear! Masters tink you dead.”

  “That is what I hoped,” Joanna said. “How did you know I survived? I myself expected to be dead.”

  “Be good at knowing,” Yenenga said, fingering her grigri. Rumor in the small community of escapees whispered that her fetishes included the dried and shriveled bolas of her late master.

  It had been fortunate indeed that Yenenga was the first to join Joanna, for the next half dozen were African men who bolted from servitude under cover of night in ones and twos and made their way up the mountain. With Yenenga at her side, they treated her respectfully from the start and had since become comrades. But it might have been otherwise had they found her alone. None of the slave women had escaped for the first year or two, not least because every one of them had borne children either to the Portuguese, fazendeiro or degradado, or to the older Jewish boys like Natan who had not only become New Christians but eagerly adopted Governor Caminha’s policy that they embrace accelerated manhood and breed.

  Now the small band included several women whose metiço children had all died in the recurrent waves of fevers. They chose partners from among the men, thus relieving much tension in the community at large. For those who did not wish to have more children, only to risk losing them, Yenenga made decoctions of various barks and herbs that so far had achieved their purpose of preventing conception. Yenenga’s body was her own to bestow, which she did rarely, as far as Joanna knew. No one troubled Joanna, who still struggled with disgust of any hint of bodily pleasure. Once or twice, Yenenga, who seemed to regard Joanna as a daughter, brought up the topic. But seeing how silent and shuttered Joanna became when the matter was mentioned, she eventually left her alone.

  Not a single Jewish child had joined the escapees. The latest arrivals, a handful of African couples, reported that only the strongest still lived. Most were dead of swamp fever, snakebite, and crocodile attack. As the Portuguese settlement spread, and more and more forest was hacked down to make way for fields of cane, the settlers made no attempt to tame the swamp but sent Jewish children to raid its resources. The Africans were considered less expendable, as they could labor for many hours in the cane fields or be set to felling trees, a task beyond the children’s strength. The surviving Jewish girls, as soon as they reached puberty, were to be mated wit
h African slaves, the priests performing the rites of Christian marriage and baptizing the children who resulted. They could look forward to a life spent toiling within the confines of a colony that could bite only so much out of this circumscribed speck in the ocean, which remained essentially wild. As Joanna and her companions discovered, the mountainous thickets in the interior could not be cultivated except in small patches and with great difficulty.

  No one ever pursued the escapees.

  “Dey tink we drowned or eaten or dead,” Yenenga said with a grin to each fearful new arrival. “I make sure dey get no different idea in dey dreams.”

  As the men grew comfortable with freedom, they began to discuss the possibility of raiding the Povoação to improve their condition or even inciting a general slave revolt. These conversations, which took place around the communal fire where they shared the evening meal, could become heated, but so far had not led to any action.

  “I would rather steal what we need than fight,” Babune said in the patois the group had developed, a blend of Portuguese and the survivors’ tribal languages, although Yenenga, for some reason, liked to amuse herself by speaking plantation pidgin to Joanna. “Metal implements, axes and shovels, bigger knives, maybe even a gun.”

  “Why a gun,” N’goran asked, “if we do not mean to fight? I say we take many guns and take the plantations from the white men. The others will join us. They do the work. Why should they not benefit from the harvest?”

  “You say ‘take many guns’ like a fool.” Fafale spat into the fire. “Before we could beat down one door of the strong hut where they keep their arms, they would be upon us. We would only end up dead. Better we sneak in by night and take sacks of that sugar cane that they stick in shit to take root.” He held his hands apart to indicate a short length of cane. “That way we start our own plantation.”