The two knights burst through the set of double doors and each took a musket blast to the chest. The close range allowed both blasts to punch through their armor and knocked them to the floor amid agonizing screams. The knight commander dispatched one of the shooters with a stroke of his sword, while Juan cut down the other to leave the Moorish king alone to face them.
To King Boadbil’s credit, he did not shy away from the conflict. He said a prayer to al-Khidr, the spiritual guide of his faith, then stepped forward and engaged the commander with a powerful overhead strike that Núñez de Guzmán barely managed to deflect. Juan made ready to enter the fray but a harsh rebuke from his superior stopped him. “No! This pagan is mine.”
As ordered, Juan sheathed his sword and stepped back to watch as the aged commander dueled with the youthful Moorish king. It was apparent from the first few blows that youth would win out and grew all the more obvious as Núñez de Guzmán’s breathing grew more labored with every motion he forced his body to perform.
Juan looked at the two fallen knights and judged neither to be of any further help as the pools of blood beneath them spread across the wooden floor. He did, however, spot a musket that would be most helpful. Juan picked up the musket and searched one of the fallen guards for the means to rearm the modern weapon.
He poured an adequate amount of gunpowder into the barrel and followed it with a lead ball before packing it down with a long metal rod. He pulled back the flint-firing hammer, shouldered the weapon, and took aim but held his fire as the two continued exchanging blows.
The Moorish king thrust a low blow that drew the commander’s blade down to deflect the cut. King Boadbil anticipated the block and responded with a lighting quick flick of his blade to send the knight commander’s weapon clattering to the floor. The duel was lost, so Juan pulled the trigger.
The shot grazed the king’s right shoulder on its way to strike Núñez de Guzmán through the throat. The impact sent the Moorish king sprawling to the floor with a shout of surprise, but the knight commander remained standing. He attempted to hold his throat, but the volume of blood flowing was beyond containment and he knew it.
“I told you I hated those infernal weapons,” Núñez de Guzmán managed to croak before collapsing to the wooden planks.
Juan had no time to lament his regrettable aim, as the Moorish king was already halfway back to his feet. Instead, he grabbed the musket by the end of the barrel, swung the hilt like a club and clobbered the side of the king’s head.
King Boadbil crashed to the floor again, and Juan stepped over the fallen sovereign moments before a dozen knights from the Order of Calatrava burst into the chamber. Juan glanced at Núñez de Guzmán’s motionless body for a brief moment before standing tall to stake his claim to the glory of this moment.
“They struck down the knight commander, but I still managed to secure the king’s capture. Put him in irons so we may present him to the queen along with this city,” Juan ordered, as if it were his place to do so.
“Huzzah,” the knights shouted, and did as instructed without question.
Your rewards for service are great and bountiful, Juan said as a silent prayer on his way out of the throne room with his captive in tow.
Chapter 8: The Hard Sell (1492)
HASTELLOY QUIETLY VENTED a heavy sigh through his nostrils as his wait to enter the throne room stretched into its third hour. Less disciplined men would be pacing about the outer chamber or verbally abusing the king’s aides at this point, but Hastelloy understood the game. This was as much a part of the process as actually presenting his proposal before the king himself.
His every action or inaction during the long wait was being appraised by those aides standing in the room with him. Later they would give testimony to the king as to Hastelloy’s true character. Was he nervous, short tempered, or cruel during the wait? Hastelloy needed every advantage available to him to succeed, so he waited in patient silence in order to make the best impression possible.
Yet another overwhelming urge to scratch under his chin and around his long mustache nearly drew an involuntary movement from his hands. The action would have looked fidgety to his audience, so he willed this particularly cruel wave of scratchiness to pass. Amid this mental exercise, Hastelloy lamented the fact that this wait would have been much easier in his prior lifetime.
After Juan murdered Hastelloy aboard the Portuguese exploring vessel, he emerged from the Nexus device housed in the command chamber back in Egypt and began life anew with the identity of a learned scholar rather than a sailor. As the ship’s navigator, he kept a clean-shaven face and scalp in order to deny the lice a comfortable home. Those were the days when a breeze across his barren head could make these hot days of summer bearable.
Now his shoulder-length hair and furry face worked together as insulation to keep his body heat and sweat trapped for a smelly, itchy result. It was uncomfortable and impractical, yet it was the prevailing fashion of the day for studious men, and Hastelloy had to conform.
At long last, Hastelloy heard a deep thump come from the other side of the double doors made of solid English oak. A moment later, the heavy doors opened and a man wearing a ridiculously floppy hat stepped out to address Hastelloy. The head ornament was supposed to be the height of English fashion these days, but Hastelloy drew the line at conforming to trends when it made him feel like the next of kin to a court jester.
“The king is ready to hear your proposal now,” the ridiculous-looking man declared.
“So soon?” Hastelloy replied on the way to his feet. “His majesty honors me with such a prompt audience.”
The pompous gatekeeper absorbed the statement with a slight tilt of his head in acknowledgement of the perceived compliment. “Follow me.”
Hastelloy fell in line behind his escort and stepped into the throne room of King Henry VII of England. The grand chamber was a long hall adorned with gold leaf moldings and ornate fresco paintings covering every square inch of the walls. At the end of the room and four red-carpeted steps above the rest of the chamber sat the king upon his golden throne. Framing his august presence were a pair of golden columns set three feet to his left and right. Ten feet overhead a circular crown as big as the throne itself corralled a tapestry that draped the back wall in a flowing sea of vibrant blue. The front edge of the tapestry opened out to the side columns to present the king much like the parting curtain at a playhouse.
Twelve occupied chairs without backrests, which looked more like footstools to Hastelloy, lined both sides of the walkway leading up to the throne. Hastelloy paused to bow at the waist when he reached the start of the walkway. He followed his escort forward and bowed once more when he came to a stop at the foot of the ascending steps.
“Presenting master astronomer and mathematician Paolo Toscanelli of Florence, Italy,” Hastelloy’s royal escort announced to the chamber and then stepped aside without another word.
“Master Toscanelli, what matter of business brings you all the way from Florence to visit us?” King Henry VII asked from his elevated seat.
“The business of exploration and profit, Your Majesty,” Hastelloy answered while setting up a floor standard to the king’s left side from which he hung a large map of the world before continuing. “As you are no doubt aware, trade with India, China, and Japan over land using the Silk Road has become exceedingly dangerous and expensive in recent years.”
“Yes, I am well aware,” the king answered. “That is why I and several other European monarchs have been actively exploring alternative routes over water.”
“Yes,” Hastelloy agreed while stepping over to his map. “To date, all efforts have been to investigate routes to the north above the Norse countries heading east,” Hastelloy indicated with his hand tracing the path, “or to the far south in the hopes of finding the southern tip of Africa before reaching the ice-laden waters of the southern Arctic latitudes.
“Viking longboats throughout the northern territories present a si
gnificant threat. If that was not danger enough, then there is also the matter of frozen waters and floating ice all along the proposed path. These two factors render this northern passage, even if it exists, unusable,” Hastelloy stated with authority.
“And what of the southern route?” the king asked with a hint of annoyance behind his words. Clearly, he had already invested significant quantities of coin, testing the northern route with no success.
“Even if that unending African continent does have a southern tip, based on how far south we have already explored, the passage is unnecessarily long. My calculations show the distance to reach the southern end of Africa is no less than seven-thousand miles,” Hastelloy explained with his hand now moving between the British Isles and the southern edge of his map.
“From there it is another five thousand miles to reach India and an additional three thousand miles to reach China. Add all that together and you have a one-way voyage of at least fifteen thousand miles,” Hastelloy exclaimed with heavy emphasis given to every syllable of his last two words.
“I grant you that the likely outcome of the southern passage will be a very long journey,” the king conceded, “but it is near land the entire voyage and can be resupplied along the way. It is viable. Besides, what other option is there?”
“West,” Hastelloy answered as he reached behind his map to fold out an extra panel that placed the known lands of Iceland and Greenland to the north and the Azores Islands in the middle of the Ocean Sea. Not much farther beyond the cluster of tiny islands, Hastelloy’s map showed the shores of Asia and the Indies islands.
“Since the time of Ptolemy, we have known the circumference of our world is eighteen thousand miles around the equator,” Hastelloy explained. “We know from measurements taken along the silk trading road with Asia that the distance from here to there going east is about fifteen thousand miles. That means Asia resides only three thousand miles to our west.”
“Three-thousand miles,” Hastelloy repeated in a booming voice. “That’s one-fifth the distance of the most optimistic estimate of a southern passage around Africa.”
Hastelloy chose that climactic moment in his presentation to fall silent and let the sheer magnitude of the figures resonate with his audience. He also held his tongue because he did not want to oversell it. In his experience, a surefire way to tell if a proposed venture was too good to be true was to count the volume of words used to sell it.
With enough words, a mathematician could prove it was possible for an elephant to hang upside down from a tree while holding onto a leaf with its tail. Still, any person with an ounce of common sense would see right through the ruse because it was too complicated. People liked things to be simple. Simpleness sold, so Hastelloy kept it simple.
He needed the king and his many advisors to trust his words at face value because if they dove into the figures too deeply, they would uncover the inescapable truth. A western trade route with Asia was impossible. The distance was too great to cover without a point of resupply along the way, but they would not know a massive set of continents was there to provide that resupply point until someone actually made the attempt and returned to tell everyone about it. It was a paradox to rival that of debating which came first, the chicken or the egg.
The only way this proposed voyage to the west would be undertaken is if someone made a mistake in the arithmetic. This was the fourth royal court Hastelloy had visited with his proposal, and the prior three ended in laughter at his expense. Would King Henry VII’s English court make that four, or would this finally be the one?
“A three thousand–mile voyage certainly is much shorter than fifteen,” King Henry began with a tone of amusement in his voice that did not bode well for Hastelloy’s sake. “In fact, that is a mere stone’s throw away from our shores by comparison. The fact that such a simple and relatively short journey to the Orient has been here under our noses since the dawn of time makes me wonder if it’s not actually the case.”
“Your Majesty,” Hastelloy attempted, but had his words drowned out by the king talking over him.
“It makes me recall my own lessons in geometry and mathematics as a child. I was taught, along with the rest of the learned world, that the circumference of our globe is actually twenty-five thousand miles. Now I am no mathematician like yourself, but my childhood arithmetic lessons inform me that the distance from our shores to China is more like ten thousand miles.”
King Henry paused for comical and dramatic effect, which gave Hastelloy an opportunity to voice his well-conceived counterargument, but he let it pass. It was obvious that the king already knew the specifics of Hastelloy’s proposal, possibly from one of the other royal courts he had visited in recent months. The English royal had already done his research and made up his mind before Hastelloy even stepped into the hall. This entire presentation was just theater. It was a stage where King Henry could display to his court his brilliance by outsmarting the subject matter expert giving the presentation. All that was left for Hastelloy to do now was play his part in the performance—the silent fool. The only thing missing was a floppy hat with bells on the ends.
“No ship in this day and age can carry enough food and fresh water for such a long voyage. That is unless you’ve somehow managed to find a crew that does not need to eat or drink. Or perhaps you’ve thought ahead and made arrangements with the mermaids of the sea to hand you provisions from their homes underneath the waves as you go,” the king teased to earn a round of laughter from his subjects.
“Why do you all laugh?” King Henry shouted in pretend anger as he rose from his throne. “Mythical sea creatures aiding this voyage are every bit as likely as the size of the globe suddenly shrinking by several thousand miles.”
That sent the hall over the top with cheers and jeers at Hastelloy’s expense. The king enjoyed his moment for a handful of heartbeats before raising his hands to induce silence once more.
“I jest at your expense, Sir, and I apologize,” King Henry said without sincerity while looking down on Hastelloy working to roll up his map. “I do not wish for you to leave my hospitality thinking of me as an ill-mannered host. I will sponsor a voyage of yours.”
That last sentence piqued Hastelloy’s interest enough for him to stop collecting his belongings and look up at the king with some semblance of hope.
“I have a ship leaving for Spain in an hour, and you now have a place reserved on that ship. I hear King Ferdinand and Queen Isabella are eager to assert themselves further as prominent European powers. I’m told that they just concluded their war to retake the Iberian Peninsula from the Moors. Perhaps they might be interested in your far-fetched notion to reach the Indies heading west. If not, then they will certainly enjoy a good laugh like the rest of us,” the king concluded.
A lesser man in that moment would have charged up the steps to the throne and choked the life out of the taunting monarch. However, Hastelloy’s intense dislike for the facial hair of this lifetime aside, he was in no mood to start over in his effort to bring knowledge of the undiscovered continents to the west to light. Instead, Hastelloy gave a polite bow at the waist and said, “Your Majesty is too kind,” before leaving the hall without a second glance behind.
One no, four no’s, a thousand no’s, it did not matter. All Hastelloy needed was one yes to his proposal. With his partner, Christopher Columbus, also heading to Spain for an audience with the Catholic monarchs, the Spanish court might hold the highest chance of success for their proposed venture.
Chapter 9: Luxury or Necessity
A BEVY OF shouts and curses roused Hastelloy from his sleep with a start. The commotion prompted him to lift his head enough to see over the side of his swaying cloth hammock. Beneath him, he watched a three-inch-deep river of seawater rush back and forth across the wood plank flooring of the ship’s lower deck.
The fact that this tiny, old ship was taking on water was of little concern to Hastelloy. Even when these vessels were in the best repair, ships of t
his era still took on water. Fine carpentry, tight seems, and sealant tar could only do so much to hold the persistent ocean waters at bay.
The boat lurched to one side, and the motion was immediately followed by the loud thump of a wave crashing against the ship’s hull. A moment later, even more water came pouring down the steps and between the planks of the weather deck above.
Hastelloy found himself sprayed a bit, but for the most part remained perfectly dry in his elevated sleeping contraption. His fellow passengers around him were not so well off. Everyone else slept on the floor with their heads resting on a coil of rope or a small sack carrying all their worldly possessions; possessions that were sopping wet and thoroughly filthy at the moment.
A pair of footsteps thundering down the stairs brought alarm to all the passengers, but Hastelloy already knew the drill. He paid the two crewmen little mind as they raced past him to reach the bilge pump in the far corner.
Not long ago, if a ship took on this much water, the entire crew would have to stop what they were doing, grab a bucket, and start bailing water from the lower decks. The bilge pump, however, made that a thing of the past. This piece of Renaissance technology used a tube fashioned from a hollowed-out log with a plunger that had a handle attached at one end and a leather flange at the other. The suction pump was able to move water more effectively than buckets could ever hope to match, and it only took two men to operate.
Hastelloy did not envy the crewmen as they coughed and gagged while they worked the contraption. Operating the plunger was exhausting work, but the worst part of the task was the smell. The bilge waters carried all the dirt, grime, feces and urine the boat’s occupants could produce. They were pumping out a river of vile sludge that Hastelloy was all too happy to sleep comfortably above.
Origins: Discovery Page 7
