The Crystal Skull

by Manda Scott

  ‘So perhaps you will also try to captain my ship? I will tell you that my father’s uncle, Geronimo de Aguilar, sailed with Juan de Valdivia, the bearer of his majesty’s most sacred purse. Their ship sank off the coast of New Spain and my great-uncle was one of only nineteen who survived to join the lifeboat. They languished under the sun, at the mercy of the winds, for two weeks until they made landfall and were taken captive by the savages. Five were eaten immediately – yes, that shocked you, did it not, Englishman? They eat men where we are going.’ His smile was widely mocking, a flare of white teeth in brown skin.

  ‘My great-uncle and one other man escaped death and were held as slaves until, eight years later, my relative escaped and returned to the fold of Christendom, becoming translator to the great Hernan Cortés as he conquered the Aztecs and made his fortune. He wrote back to us, his family, of how barren was the landscape and how poor the people, and yet he stayed to live and die there, when he could have come home and been a hero. Do you not think that strange, Englishman? I do. So I am taking a ship to see why he chose to stay there, and to make the fortune he did not see in the green gold around him. I have as yet heard no reason why I should take you with me when I have turned down so many among the great and the good of my town.’

  The Spaniard reached a long, lazy arm and poured himself some more wine without offering any to Owen. In England, men had died for insults less starkly made than that, although none of them at Owen’s hand: he had been the bane of his swordmaster’s existence, sent packing with the advice never to risk the ignominy of a duel.

  De Aguilar grinned savagely and said, ‘I am not greatly taken by your first two reasons. For your third, you are not, I hope, going to suggest that I should take you on because my king has these past two years been married to the unloveliness that is your queen? His marriage is a sham and all true Spanish men pity him the chains of necessity that he must endure for the betterment of us, his people.’

  Cedric Owen rose to his feet. He had been going to say exactly that, if in different words, which was humiliating if only because it was an idea he had made in jest as he travelled and had thought would be put in good-humoured company where the irony would be understood between men of the world who were acquainted with the vagaries of royalty. De Aguilar, clearly, had no sense of irony and his good humour was reserved for his own countrymen, who were welcome to it.

  Owen had removed his hat at the start. He replaced it now, a shabby cap by comparison to the silked, befeathered effigy that sat at de Aguilar’s side. He bowed stiffly, from the neck only. ‘Señor, I am wasting your time and mine. I will find another way to travel to the barren landscape you describe, which I have heard is a fertile forested land of great wonder and civilized peoples. I apologize for interrupting your day and offending your hospitality. If you will allow me to pay for the wine …?’

  He had not expected that offer to be accepted. The fact that it was, and that the tavern owner charged at least ten times what the wine was worth, left him with a much reduced purse and a foul temper.

  Some hours later, in the cool of the evening, Cedric Owen found a tavern where his imperfect Spanish was greeted with the warmth he had once so fondly expected, and the fish soup was rich and plentiful and did not lighten his pockets too much further.

  He fell to talking with an actuary who had once been an employee of the Medici bankers and the conversation meandered from the New World to the Old and back again, with detours into the many ways a man might make himself rich and then save what money he had earned without losing it to the ravages of taxation and monarchs who thought of the banks as their own private lending service.

  None of it touched on the ‘green gold’ of de Aguilar’s dreams, but it was interesting and stimulating none the less and became more so as the evening progressed.

  Owen took more wine than perhaps he should have done, but it was the first time he had relaxed in amenable company since leaving France and it was a cheerful man who left the tavern to return to his lodgings up near the Moorish walls when the landlord ushered him out.

  He liked Seville better by night than by day. The air was warm but not too hot and the flies were gone. The sky was a shimmer of stars that looked sharper and closer than those he was used to viewing from the flat fenlands of Cambridge. Owen stopped halfway up the hill and stood with his back arched over and his neck craned so that he could stare straight up at the sky the better to appreciate the arc of the heavens and all that was in it. It revolved slowly, and unsteadily, which was unsettling, but not unduly surprising.

  ‘Help! Murderers! Help!’

  The cry was in Spanish and came from his left. Without thinking, Cedric Owen ran towards it, skidding round a corner to enter a narrow, angular alleyway that was barely wide enough for his shoulders, more of an open drain between two neighbouring rows of white-limed villas. No candles or torches were lit there. The milky shimmer of the starlight was cut out entirely by the overhanging roof tiles.

  The dark ate his shadow and turned the ground into a lightless void where he could not tell if he ran over solid ground or a pothole – or decomposing fish guts, which sent him hurtling into a stack of boxes he had not known were there and from them into a barrel of old fish, which upended, sending him at last to the ground, which was firm and hard and drove the last of the wind from his lungs.

  ‘Aaaayeeeeh—!’

  The scream started low, rose fast to a screech, and then stopped, abruptly, to be followed by a dull silence, and the discordant rhythm of wood beaten on flesh.

  Owen thrust himself to his feet. Bracing both hands against the side walls of the alley for support and direction, he hurried as fast as he could round the elbowed bend towards the sounds.

  A spill of light from a part-open door revealed a huddled shape on the ground and two others bent over it. The grunts of pain that came from the figure on the ground were animal in their nature, so that Owen could not tell if it were a man or a woman, or of what race. The sounds of beating ended. A long iron blade flashed dully in the poor light.

  ‘Stop! Stop now!’

  Outnumbered, unarmed, unsober, and against all the urgings of his fencing master, Cedric Owen flung himself on the figure holding the knife.

  The fight was brief and painful and the first surprising thing about it was that Cedric Owen did not die immediately.

  The second surprising thing was that, lying in the gutter with his head cracked open and blood streaming down his face and that same knife poised high above him, he felt no fear at the certain prospect of dying, only an opening of the doorway in his mind that led to the blue heart-stone, so that the future blazed through, and was open and beautiful and he could walk towards it in peace, forgetting the burden that Nostradamus had laid on him.

  The final surprising thing was that the raised blade never struck home. As Owen stared out into the blue and set his thoughts in order, he felt a hand grasp his shoulder and lift him to sitting.

  ‘Well, that was an intriguing thing, was it not, Señor Owen? I am attacked by cutthroats in my home city and the only person who comes to my cry in the whole of Seville is a drunken, fish-stinking, English doctor.’

  The bruised and bloodied face of Fernandez Alberto Garcia de Aguilar grinned at Owen. With one hand, the Spaniard helped him to his feet. The man’s other arm hung limp at his side, with the hand turned out at an unnatural angle. Blood flowed in a slowly clotting stream down his wrist and on to the ground.

  Owen spat a lump of his own blood on to the stones beneath his feet. Through swollen lips, he said, ‘Your arm needs urgently to be set.’

  ‘It does indeed. Is that within the purview of a physician?’

  ‘I can do it, yes.’ Silently, he thanked Nostradamus for that.

  The Spaniard was in wild, high spirits, such as men are who have fought against heavy odds and won, but his eyes were steady and the soul behind them was not the primped, self-opinionated popinjay that Cedric Owen had met in the afternoon.

&
nbsp; ‘If you would care to assist with its setting, then perhaps afterwards we could review our conversation of this afternoon? Perhaps your queen is not the unregarded spawn of a rutting boar that I believed her to be and it may be that there is room upon the Aurora for a physician who can set bone and can tell me when the moon might not be in opposition to the warrior-star. We sail in two weeks’ time. It is my turn, I believe, to buy the wine?’

  7

  Aboard the Aurora, third ship of his Spanish majesty’s convoy sailing under Fernandez de Aguilar, Atlantic Ocean: westerly course, September 1556

  ITS POSITION FIGURED by the night method, instead of the day, the Part of Fortune crossed from the Goat to the Water Carrier and lay in wide squares to both Venus and Saturn, which lay in mutual ill-omened opposition.

  Accordingly, a steady rain smeared the sky into the sea and the fish were not biting. Cedric Owen was sitting with his feet over the ship’s stern, holding a useless fishing line in his hand, feeling seasick and sorry for himself when Fernandez de Aguilar came to find him.

  The rain was not hard enough to drive him inside, more of a soft, insistent patter that soaked through the brown worsted of his suit until it chafed at every crease of his skin.

  He was not, either, feeling sick enough to keep to his cabin as he had for the first ten days of the voyage. During his early training in medicine, he had sailed several times to France and Spain and had thought himself a seasoned traveller, but the sudden change to the open ocean, as they sailed south and west from Seville, had left him semi-conscious and vomiting, so that Fernandez de Aguilar had threatened to break apart their six-ship convoy and turn the Aurora back to put him off at the nearest port rather than have him puke up the root and fire of his guts and die on board.

  Owen had begged leave to remain, in part because his pride would not let him turn back, but chiefly because his blue heart-stone was as happy as he had ever known it. It remained a calm and steady presence at the back of his mind, radiating contentment like a lover given the ultimate gift, and he would not have taken that happiness away from it for something as trivial as his own discomfort.

  He had stayed, therefore, and managed to drink enough clear water to prevent the salt of his body from overwhelming the mercury and sulphur and on this, the tenth morning of the voyage, had emerged tentatively to sit on the aft deck of the Aurora with his booted feet dangling over the stern and a long line in his hand, waiting for the lean, oily fish that swam far below the surface to take his bait of salted beef, a thing they showed no inclination to do.

  De Aguilar, as ship’s captain, had shown no sign of illness at any point, nor did he now. Perfectly at ease, he leaned both elbows on the stern rail and looked out along the long, silvered tail of the ship’s wake, showing off his perfect profile.

  He was, Owen decided, more Latin than Spanish, a youthful, vigorous Trajan, lacking only the beard to cement his authority. His hair was long and thick and coiled into wet ropes that spread out around his shoulders as it dried. His caustic grey eyes were thickly lashed, like a girl’s. Even soaked to the skin, he managed to look regal. To the right kind of man, he would have been beautiful.

  Owen had met such things only peripherally at Cambridge, and taken pains to avoid them. Struck by a new awareness, he wondered which of the crew would look thus on their captain, and whether any of them would dare act on it, or be welcomed if they tried.

  De Aguilar said, ‘Now that you’re well enough, you should go barefoot. It makes moving on deck far easier.’

  The comment was so unexpected that it took a moment before Owen realized it had been addressed to him. Stiffly, he said, ‘You do not.’

  ‘Hose and boots are the penance of the captain and his mate. They are not necessary for those unbound by the restrictions of rank. You are not so bound. If you abandon your shoes and your jacket, what remains of your brown suit will fit exactly with all that you need: warm in the cold, cool in the heat, and it will dry out when wet. You only need change your shirt once in a while and the men will still think you dress a world above them. Thus you will not lose your dignity.’

  ‘I see.’

  They fell back into an awkward silence.

  De Aguilar stared thoughtfully at the sea and the three boats of the convoy that sailed just far enough back to be visible. ‘You have never been on a long sea voyage before?’

  ‘No.’

  Owen was about to tie fast the fishing line and untie the cord that held his waist when something big grabbed at his bait and caught fast.

  He would have let the line go but that it was borrowed and he did not wish Dominic, the ship’s boy, such ill will as to lose it. He could have sat there watching it cheese-wire through the waves but there were levels of foolishness to which he was not prepared to stoop. He began, cursing, to haul it in, hand over hand, dreading the inelegant final struggle to bring its catch aboard.

  ‘You’re not enjoying it?’ de Aguilar asked presently.

  ‘The fishing or the voyage?’

  ‘Both. Either.’ The captain did not offer to help.

  ‘I did not come for the pleasure, only for the destination.’

  Owen’s fish broached the surface, thrashing. It was big and fit and did not want to leave the sea. He braced both feet against the stern rails and hauled it up, becoming ever more aware that he stank of sick and sea-salt and sweat, and that de Aguilar, by a process of unexplained alchemy, did not.

  The fish came out of the water, fighting. It was as long as his arm, slick and silver as the moon, and bucked over the rail. The hook had caught it across the cheek, under its eye. Owen felt a stab of guilt at his dragging of an innocent thing from safe security into a medium of which it knew nothing and then threatening it with untimely death.

  He could have jammed his fingers in its gills, ripped free the hook and priested it with the small ironwood handle that the ship’s boy had left to hand for just that purpose.

  Instead, he managed a more dextrous thing: he tugged loose the hook and fumbled his hands so that even while it looked as if he was trying to bring it aboard, the fish slipped free. It hit the white water and twisted and was gone. He thought it was still alive.

  There was silence, and the quieter splash of the sea against the ship, and then de Aguilar said, thoughtfully, ‘Well done,’ which was quite the least thing Owen had expected.

  The rain was almost gone and the cloud was lifting. The sun leaked through patchily, sending intermittent shadows aft along the ship’s length. Something about the quality of the light lifted Owen’s gloom. He tied off his fishing line and began to untie the sodden cord at his waist.

  His action broke whatever spell had held them. The captain turned, leaning his back on the stern rail in a way that looked entirely unsafe. Concerned, Owen said, ‘If the rail should break …’

  ‘Then I have not built my ship to last and I will fall overboard and follow your fish to the ocean’s floor, carried under by the weight of my own gold. I know. We both have to hope, therefore, that I have built the ship with this in mind and that my wearing of gold is proof of my belief in her, not my undoing.’

  It had never occurred to Owen that the Spaniard’s excess of gold was anything more than vanity. It seemed to him still that it was not. The idea that the crew might view it differently brought him round again to the captain’s status as demi-god with his men.

  Watching him closely, de Aguilar said, ‘When we spoke of your coming on the voyage, we never considered your family and how it might affect them. Have you a wife who is mourning your absence?’

  ‘I have no wife.’

  ‘For one so talented? I find that hard to believe. A lover then, of a stronger wine?’

  That was very much too close to the bone. Owen flushed rarely, but when he did it was spectacular, such as now, when hot blood breached the wall of his neck and flooded his face.

  Stiffly, he said, ‘I have no lover, nor any desire for one. At some point, I may hope to have a wife, but that time
has not yet come. In the meantime, I remain continent. It may not be fashionable in Spain, and certainly was not in England under the late King Henry, but I have no wish to make the demands of intimacy upon any woman without the benefit to her of marriage. If you find that risible, I would ask you to keep your humour private while aboard ship. A physician needs a certain amount of respect from his patients, or his skills are rendered worthless. You, of course, are exempt. I expect no respect from you, nor wish any to be expected of me.’

  Whatever you do, never force a duel unless it be of the mind. Keep your insults more subtle than those of any man you choose to upset. It is the only way you will survive. So his fencing master had said. Owen apologized to him in his mind.

  He needed to leave. Anger at last made his fingers nimble, so that the cord holding him seated was not impossible to untie. He struggled with the last two turns of the knot.

  Peaceably, de Aguilar said, ‘I apologize for offending you. You are that rare thing, a nobleman in the true sense of the word. I had thought it, but was not certain. I will not, therefore, send Dominic to your cabin tonight. I’m sure he will be most relieved.’

  ‘As will whoever he might have stayed with instead, I have no doubt. You, perhaps? Or is that place reserved for the first mate whose shoulder I set yesterday? You should know that, as his physician, I recommended that Juan-Cruz refrain from rigorous exercise for a half-month. I apologize if this causes you inconvenience.’

  Barring a minor accident with the rigging, which had dislocated his shoulder, Juan-Cruz was a supremely competent seaman. He was also the ugliest man on board and to link him thus to the captain was an infantile insult. Owen regretted it on every level. He stood, shaking, facing de Aguilar, certain that he would die, and equally certain that nothing would make him retract what he had said.