By Fire, By Water

by Mitchell James Kaplan

  “On the deck, in the hold, anywhere. If they can’t find a spot, they stay awake. Most likely, they’ll keep you awake, too, with their shouting, their singing, their quarrels. A bunch of brawlers, the lot of them. Some wine?”

  “Please.”

  Colón had taken the trouble to place a ceramic decanter and two tin cups on the writing table. He filled one and handed it to Santángel. “To the Giustizia, and to the holy war against Granada, which she’ll help win for our king and queen.”

  That night, as the Giustizia groaned and swayed, the two men slid roughly carved knights and pawns across the crude squares of a chessboard painted on the lid of Colón’s trunk. Being the more voluble of the two, the captain entertained the man who controlled King Fernando’s finances, relating tales of trading and the sea.

  “Near Lisbon, pirates attacked us,” he reminisced. “They set my ship ablaze. I had to swim ashore. Lost everything. Had to start all over in a foreign land. To learn a new language. To scrabble for bread.” He sipped his wine. “Eventually, I befriended a cartographer close to the court. My brother now works for him. I’ve stayed in Lisbon six years, now. More than ready for another move.”

  “Where will you go?”

  “Andalusia. Medina-Celi and I, we have plans.”

  Santángel nodded. His sometime business associate Luis de la Cerda, the duke of Medina-Celi, owned a shipping enterprise near Cadiz. He had helped finance the Giustizia and had introduced the chancellor to Colón.

  “I married the most beautiful, loving woman in existence,” resumed the captain. “To believe in a hapless dreamer like me, she had to be an angel sent by God. She died. You, too, lost your wife, did you not, Chancellor?”

  “Yes.” Santángel glanced into Colón’s pearly eyes. “I only regret God didn’t give me more time with her.” He remembered his departed wife’s laugh, her lively voice, her love for their son, whom she had carried with so much pain and whom she had held only once.

  His thoughts wandered to the fruit of their love. He had left Gabriel, now eight, in the care of his brother Estefan. “No wine, no women, I promise,” Estefan had assured him. Eager to let Estefan prove himself, Santángel had accepted the arrangement.

  “And today?” asked Colón. “Is there a woman close to your heart?” He inched one of his pawns forward.

  “No.” Santángel pushed a knight toward the center of the board.

  “I’m always riding the sea, and what a skittish stallion she is, from port to port,” said the captain. “From one wench’s arms to another. Haven’t found another lady like my wife.” The boat heaved. He held onto the trunk, which was nailed to the floor.

  “Our wives die,” said Santángel, “to give birth to our sons. And we go on through life, pursuing our vain ambitions.” He shook his head.

  “Life’s cruelty surely must lead to some reward.”

  “What reward?” Santángel shot back. “Wealth? Prestige? Titles? Do you believe God cares about our rank?”

  “No. God cares about one thing. Jerusalem.”

  “How so?” Santángel moved a bishop. If he had sentiments about Jerusalem, he was not about to reveal them. Not even here, so far from home.

  “God wants Jerusalem liberated. He needs our help.” Colón quaffed his wine and wiped his mouth on his sleeve. “I would think you, of all people, would appreciate that, Chancellor.”

  Santángel ignored the insinuation. “Why would God want us to shed blood over a few stones in a desolate, faraway desert?”

  Colón peered at him skeptically.

  “There’s so much strife in our own land, Señor Colón. In Aragon, in Castile. No, there are certainly more worthy quests than the liberation of Jerusalem.”

  “I cannot think of any.” Colón slid his king one square to the right.

  Santángel was not about to list the worthier pursuits. To speak of such things would be to reveal his private hopes and disappointments. “Why don’t we stop for now? We’ll resume tomorrow.”

  Colón’s eyes met the chancellor’s. “Quite the lazy wretch, that pope of ours, eh?” he spat out, apropos of nothing.

  Santángel decided not to accept this bait, either. “Good evening, Captain.” As he rose, the ship tossed. He almost fell.

  Colón caught him. “Are you all right, Chancellor?”

  “Just a little queasy, thank you.”

  The captain held on to him until the chancellor steadied himself.

  Santángel retreated to his cabin, where he relived his meeting with the pope, searching through the pontiff’s words and expressions for encouraging signs—signs that he, his friends, and his associates would prevail in the struggle of their lives, the struggle for their lives. He closed his eyes and covered his ears to muffle the hollering, pounding, and cursing of the sailors, the creaking of the ship. Occasionally he nibbled on the salted, dried cod and hard bread, or sipped the wine that his steward, the child whose freedom he had purchased, delivered to his room.

  Santángel attempted to teach this boy a few words of Castilian. He learned his name, Dumitru, and his father’s name, Iancu. He sent a short note to Colón: “Please permit Dumitru to sleep with his father.”

  On the third morning, Santángel ventured out for a taste of the crisp, salty air. The ship squawked as a stiff breeze shoved it westward. Cristóbal Colón greeted him with a lopsided grin. “Ah, Chancellor, finding our sea legs at last, are we?”

  “I’m feeling somewhat better, thank you.”

  He glanced down the deck at a group of sailors entertaining each other with a fight. A seagull called out and dove toward the water, then soared upward again, a small mackerel squirming in its beak.

  “If you would follow me, Chancellor. I have something that may interest you.” Colón gently took his guest’s arm.

  From his battered wooden chest, the captain removed a variety of texts, some hand-copied, others mechanically printed. Onto many of these pages, Colón had scribbled his own comments.

  “Aristotle. Treatise on Heaven and Earth. Look here.” The captain found a page in the thin octavo and read not from the Latin itself, but from the notes he had written in the margin: “The Ocean, it is not immeasurable.” He looked up. “You see, Chancellor? One can sail from Castile to Cipangu.”

  “Cipangu?”

  “The great island-state of the Indias, where gold and pearls can be had for next to nothing.” His large, chafed hands dug further into the chest until he found a ragged copy of Marco Polo’s Description of the World. “Ah.” He leafed delicately through this book, once again examining his notes.

  He closed the volume and searched for another. “Ptolemy. He proved that of the three hundred and sixty degrees of the globe, only one hundred and thirty-five are water.” The captain recited this fact, and others, in the manner of a student preparing for an examination.

  “That’s quite a collection, Captain. And your knowledge is hardly less impressive. But what is it that …”

  Colón interrupted, eyes gleaming. “If we sailed west, Chancellor, if we just sailed due west, a few weeks, not more, we could reach the Indias directly. We wouldn’t have to trade with the Saracens.”

  “Señor Colón, if you’re asking me … If what you’re asking me is to finance a voyage of exploration …”

  The captain plunged forward. “And if we continued westward from there … the Garden of Eden. Paradise. A land so abundant with spices, gold, and every fruit and animal you can imagine, it puts even Cipangu to shame. And beyond that,” he added in a reverential tone, almost a whisper, “Jerusalem.”

  Santángel sat down on Colón’s berth. “Suppose we were to go there, Señor Colón. Suppose we were to retake Jerusalem from the east, as you suggest. Then what?”

  “Then … this world would be a different place. A very different place.”

  “Perhaps. But if such a voyage could truly be done, surely someone would have gone there and come back to tell of it.”

  Colón removed a worn leather
envelope from his trunk. “That is the right question, Chancellor. I have other texts, rare texts, that just may answer it.”

  From the pouch he extracted small pamphlets, a rolled-up parchment, single leaves—some torn, some printed, and some in manuscript. He closed the trunk, lay several pages on its lid, and gazed at their characters like a child peering into a cloudy pond, trying to discern the forms of wriggling fish.

  “What are they?” Santángel gawped at the strange calligraphy.

  “I don’t know. I was hoping you could tell me. I know you speak many tongues.”

  “Castilian, Aragonese, Arabic, a smattering of Italian. No others.”

  “I got these,” Colón explained, “from Señor José Vizinho. Perhaps you’ve heard of him. The great cartographer, in Lisbon. A Jew.”

  “I’m afraid I know little of that science.”

  “These texts, they’re quite rare. And the secrets in them, they’re invaluable, from what I was told.” He began replacing the texts in their pouch. “Perhaps you know someone who could translate them.” Colón attempted to place the leather envelope in Santángel’s hands.

  “I’m sorry, Señor Colón, but I cannot accept this.” The chancellor was not a fearful man, but the thought of harboring Hebrew documents filled his heart with a black dread.

  “That is unfortunate.” Colón dropped the pouch on his berth and clapped Santángel on the shoulder. “But I understand, Chancellor. I understand.”

  The chancellor doubted Colón could possibly understand. The New Inquisition was a war. For Luis de Santángel to possess a Hebrew text would amount to suicide.

  Despite that war, and in part because of it, Santángel longed to return to Zaragoza—to his son, his brother, his home.

  At the port of Barcelona, he took leave of Cristóbal Colón. On unsteady legs, he proceeded to the Braying Goat, a small portside inn. He paid the innkeeper for feeding and watering his horse Béatriz while he was away, and commissioned him to forward his trunk to the royal palace of Zaragoza.

  Béatriz measured only fourteen hands, but she was strong and alert. Her silky mane fell to one side of a graceful, arched neck. Her shoulders gently sloped. A narrow stripe, nearly black in color, stretched along the top of her roan coat from her mane to her tail. While the innkeeper saddled her, Santángel sipped a bowl of well water and asked for news from the royal court. The innkeeper claimed to have heard Queen Ysabel’s name spoken, more than once, as well as King Fernando’s, but could not say whether troops were massing in the south or whether the plague had struck Sevilla. “I can quote you the price of a barrel of wine or a bucket of fish. But news from the court …” He rubbed his neck. “The high and lofty don’t pass this way often. Except you, my lord.” He handed Santángel the reins, accepting with a bow the coins offered.

  The chancellor rode for five days, savoring the foretaste of his reunion with those dear to him, attempting to put out of his mind the challenges ahead. He traversed long valleys where peasants harvested wheat and fruit. He crossed hills covered with oak and scrub. Clouds filled the sky. The autumn air grew chill. On the fourth day, a storm broke. Santángel persisted through the rain. Having traveled these muddy roads before, he knew where to find a good cup and where to lay his head.

  When he reached the hills south of Zaragoza, the sun was sinking through bloated yellow clouds, washing the region in a golden light. He pulled back on his horse’s reins and contemplated the view, this oasis in a parched land, irrigated by the softly meandering, teal-colored River Ebro.

  The almond and peach trees beside the river had shed most of their leaves. Beyond them, peasants wearing dun-brown smocks bent over fields of wheat, wielding scythes. Roman walls, which the army of Caesar Augustus had built centuries earlier, separated these orchards and fields from the cluster of tile-roofed dwellings.

  The city’s name, as well as its architecture, told the story of its long-contested territory. The Romans had named the settlement after their emperor. The Visigoths captured “Caesaraugusta” from the Romans, and the Moors from the Visigoths. The syllables of its name melted together, as if in the North African sun, into the more Arabic-sounding “Saraqusta.” After the Christians retook the city in 1118, their tongues rounded the sharp edges of “Saraqusta” to “Zaragoza,” much as the River Ebro smoothed the stones of its bed.

  To the west lay the crenellations of the monumental citadel the Moors had built, the aljaferia, now King Fernando’s palace. Near the center of the city, the towers of La Seo Cathedral, once an Islamic mosque, cast long shadows toward the river. The seven-arched stone bridge, the puente de piedra, stretched across the river behind the cathedral.

  Zaragoza. This small, isolated, land-locked village, home of Aragonese rulers for so many generations. Santángel’s refuge, and his battleground.

  That morning, residents of the town had celebrated the Fiesta del Pilar, commemorating the day when the Virgin Mary appeared atop a pillar in the center of Zaragoza, ushering Christianity into the Iberian Peninsula. Parades had wound through the cobblestone streets. Peasants and guildsmen had danced together in the plazas. In many homes, festivities would continue into the night.

  In honor of the holiday, celebrants had festooned La Seo with ribbons, clay figurines of the Virgin, crudely painted wooden icons, and field flowers. At this hour, late in the afternoon, the worshipers had gone home but their offerings remained. A few churchmen hovered in the corners, muttering.

  Santángel strode to the back of the cathedral and knelt facing the bloody crucifix. He wanted not only to attempt sincere, wholehearted prayer, but also to be seen praying. “Dear Lord,” he closed his eyes, “thank you for protecting me and bringing me home safely. Please bestow your blessings and protection on my only child, Gabriel. I pray that my late wife is watching him from a place of repose. Please also protect King Fernando and Queen Ysabel. Open their hearts to the sufferings of those worthy of their compassion. Bring us success in our war against the kingdom of Granada. Let us be victorious, but let us not abuse our victory.” He waited for more such earnest thoughts. “Bring us clear sight, Lord,” he concluded, “of what is good and what is evil.”

  He opened his eyes and peered at the wounded, twisted statue of Christ. He tried to visualize the real Christ standing before him, the God made flesh and blood who came to die for man’s sins, the God of forgiveness and redemption. Try as he might, he could not see God. He could only see a man. He had seen those same eyes, that gaunt face a year previously, at an auto-da-fé in Sevilla. On that day, in the name of the Lord, the Inquisition had burned fifteen heretics, fifteen conversos. Among them, four women and three boys barely out of childhood.

  When those poor souls, who had endured starvation and torture, stared down at the spellbound crowd, it struck Santángel with the force of a nightmare that one of them looked just like the Lord Jesus Messiah. He remembered a painting he had seen in Barcelona, a depiction of Jesus reaching out to help as Saint Peter attempted to walk upon water. That pale, absent, undone expression. The chancellor, shocked, had crossed himself. The others around him, entranced by the spectacle of human agony, seemed not to notice.

  He examined the statue again, hoping to perceive something of its divine mystery. To his chagrin, another prayer came silently to his lips, a prayer his mother had taught him when he was nine years old, a secret heritage. He thought he had forgotten. He should have forgotten, for his own sake and for that of his son.

  Shema Yisrael … “Hear, Israel: the Lord, our God. The Lord. One.”

  One. Abstract, impalpable, unseeable, even unknowable. The God of Santángel’s grandparents, so distant, so silent, so inaccessible. Santángel crossed himself, lonelier than ever, and rose to leave.

  As he walked back through the nave, he caught sight of Pedro de Arbués, the canon of La Seo Cathedral, speaking in the shadows with Pedro de Monterubio, the monsignor of Zaragoza. A mountain of a man, swathed in white and gold vestments, the canon listened with his fleshy face slightl
y lowered, looking up at Monterubio.

  “With your new responsibilities, Father, surely you won’t have time to lead the Mass or take confession.”

  “On the contrary,” insisted Arbués, “Even as Chief Inquisitor of Zaragoza, I remain the humble shepherd of my flock.” Hearing Santángel’s footsteps, he glanced down the nave, then back at the monsignor.

  Santángel slowed his pace.

  Monsignor Pedro de Monterubio, thin, gray, and frail with age, pleaded with the canon as though he ranked lower in the hierarchy. “Father Arbués, I beseech you. Please avail yourself of our assistance.”

  Perhaps the monsignor, too, feared the encroachment of the Inquisition, reflected Santángel, and wished to plant eyes and ears within Arbués’s office.

  Arbués turned again to face the chancellor. The two churchmen ceased speaking.

  His heart pounding, Santángel stepped into the plaza. Dusk was approaching. A wood seller, pushing a cart, saw him and spat onto the cobblestones.

  Santángel grabbed him by the shoulders. “Wood seller, why did you spit?”

  “My lord, forgive me. I meant nothing.”

  The chancellor held him. “You saw me. You spat. Why?”

  The woodsman coughed and swallowed. Santángel released him and climbed onto his horse.

  He dismounted at his stable, entered the courtyard, and paused. Beyond the high windows on either side, candles and a hearth fire lit the front rooms. Music stung Santángel’s ears, staccato, droning, sinuously melodic. He peered inside and felt his face grow warm.

  A young, round-faced woman with pale skin, curly black hair, and dark, mournful eyes stood by the stone fireplace, singing in a high-pitched voice. A few scruffy town-dwellers accompanied her on organistrum, rebec, pipe, tambourine, and castanets. Others—some just emerging from youth, some ragged with age—danced with their arms stretched skyward, stomping their feet, clapping their hands, punctuating the lively pastorale with chirps and yelps. Santángel recognized among them his cook, his stable boy, even his son’s tutors. Señora Gómez, a blowzy peasant’s daughter who worked in the kitchen, pranced around the middle of the room, a bright red scarf over her shoulders, reaching out as she jiggled and swayed. The greatest affront of all was a bull of a man, in a luxurious cobalt blue doublet, fitted pants, and calfskin boots that looked too dainty to support his prominent gut, who strutted through a raucous jota with her, holding one hand behind his back and spinning the servant with the other. Estefan.