Pastwatch

by Orson Scott Card

  Or worse. The gentle plague might have caused a change in behavior by the Indies. There might have been bloodshed, bad enough to make the Europeans head for home. Or Columbus might have been told something that led him to take a different route—circling Haiti counterclockwise, for instance, instead of charting the north shore.

  They had known that the virus could upset their plans, because it would move faster and farther than the time travelers could. Yet it was also the surest, most basic aspect of their plan. What if only one traveler got through, and then was killed immediately? Even so, the virus would be communicated to those who touched the body during the first few hours. If no other change could be introduced, this one might be enough—to keep the Indies from being swept away in a tide of European diseases.

  So it’s a good thing, Kemal told himself. A good thing that Columbus is late, because it means that the virus is doing its work. We’ve already changed the world. We’ve already succeeded.

  Only it didn’t feel like success to him. Living on stored rations, hiding out here on this isolated promontory, watching for the sails, Kemal wanted to accomplish something more personal than being the carrier of a healing virus. Allah wills whatever happens, he knew, but he was not so pious that he could keep himself from wishing he could whisper a word or two in Allah’s ear. A few pointed suggestions.

  It wasn’t until the third day that he saw a sail. Too early in the day. In the old version of history, Columbus had arrived later, which was why the Santa Maria wrecked, running against a submerged reef in the darkness. Now it wouldn’t be dark. And even if it were, the currents and winds would not be the same. Kemal would have to destroy all three ships. Worse, without the the accident with the Santa Maria, there would be no reason for the Niña to drop anchor. Kemal would have to follow along the shore and watch for his opportunity. If it came.

  If I fail, thought Kemal, the others may still succeed. If Hunahpu manages to preempt the Tlaxcalans and create a Zapotec-Tarascan empire that has abandoned or downplayed human sacrifice, then the Spanish won’t have such an easy time of it. If Diko is somewhere in the highlands, she may be able to create a new proto-Christian religion and, conceivably, a unified Caribbean empire that the Spaniards will not easily crack. After all, Spanish success depended almost entirely upon the inability of the Indies to organize serious resistance. So even if Columbus gets back to Europe, history will still be different.

  He could whisper all these reassuring things, but they tasted like ashes in his mouth. If I fail, America loses its fifty years of preparation before the Europeans come.

  Two ships. Not three. That was a relief. Or was it? As long as history was changing, it might have been better for Columbus’s fleet to stay together. Pinzón had taken the Pinta away from the rest of the fleet, just as in the former history. But now who could guess whether Pinzón would have his change of heart and sail back to Haiti to rejoin Columbus? This time he might simply go on eastward, arriving in Spain first and claiming all the credit for Columbus’s discovery.

  That’s out of my hands, Kemal told himself. The Pinta will either come back or it will not. I have the Niña and the Santa Maria, and I must make sure that they, at least, never return to Spain.

  Kemal watched until he could see that the ships were turning south, to round the Cape of San Nicolas. Would they take the same course they had followed in the prior history, sailing south a bit more, then turning back to chart the north coast of the island of Haiti? Nothing was predictable anymore, even if logic proclaimed that whatever reasons Columbus had for his actions in the other history, the same reasons would hold sway this time, too.

  Kemal picked his way carefully down to the stand of trees near the water where he had concealed his inflatable boat. Unlike lifeboats, this one was not bright orange. Rather it was a greenish blue, designed to be invisible on the water. Kemal pulled on his wet suit, also greenish blue, and pulled the boat into the water. Then he loaded it with enough underwater charges to deal with both the Santa Maria and the Niña, should the opportunity present itself. Then he started up the engine and put out to sea.

  It took him a half hour to be far enough from shore to be reasonably confident of being invisible to the keen-eyed watchers on the Spanish caravels. Only then did he sail westward far enough to see the Spanish sails. To his relief, they had dropped anchor off Cape San Nicolas and small boats were putting to shore. It might be December ninth rather than the sixth, but Columbus was making the same decisions he had made before. The weather was getting cold, for this part of the world, and Columbus would have the same problems getting through the channel between Tortuga and Haiti until the fourteenth of December. Perhaps Kemal would be better off if he put back to shore and waited for history to repeat itself.

  Or perhaps not. Columbus would be anxious to sail east in order to beat Pinzón back to Spain, and this time he might go out around Tortuga, tacking into the trade winds and completely avoiding the treacherous shore winds that would drive him onto the reefs. This might be Kemal’s last chance.

  But then, Cape San Nicolas was far from where Diko’s tribe lived—if in fact she had succeeded in becoming part of the village that had first called to the people of the future to save them. Why make things harder for her?

  He would wait and watch.

  At first when the Pinta started slipping farther and farther away, Cristoforo supposed that Pinzón was avoiding some hazard in the water. Then, as the caravel drifted nearer the horizon, Cristoforo tried to believe what the men were telling him—that the Pinta must be unable to read the signals that Cristoforo was sending. This was nonsense, of course. The Niña also lay to portside, and was having no trouble at all staying on course. By the time the Pinta dropped over the horizon, Cristoforo knew that Pinzón had betrayed him, that the onetime pirate was now determined to sail direct for Spain and report to Their Majesties before Cristoforo could get there. Never mind that it would be Cristoforo who was recognized officially as the head of the expedition, or that the royal officials traveling with the expedition would report Pinzón’s perfidy—it would be Pinzón who would reap the first fame, Pinzón whose name would live through history as the man who returned first to Europe from the westward route to the Orient.

  Pinzón had never sailed far enough south to know that this steady east wind gave way, in lower latitudes, to the steady west wind that Cristoforo had felt when he sailed in Portuguese vessels. So there was a good chance that if Cristoforo could just get far enough south, he could reach Spain long before Pinzón, who would no doubt be tacking his way across the Atlantic, a slow proposition at best. There was a good chance that Pinzón’s progress would be so slow that he would have to give up and return to these islands to resupply his caravel.

  A good chance, but no certainty, and Cristoforo could not shake the sense of urgency—and barely suppressed fury—that Pinzón’s disloyalty had provoked. Worst of all, there was no one in whom he could confide, for the men were doubtless all rooting for Pinzón to win, while in front of the officers and the royal officials Cristoforo could show no weakness or worry.

  So it was that Cristoforo took little pleasure in charting the unknown coast of the great island the natives called Haiti, and which Cristoforo had named Hispañola. Perhaps he might have enjoyed the charting more if it had proceeded steadily, but the east wind was against him all along the coast. They had to harbor for days at the place that the men called Mosquito Bay, and again for several days at Paradise Valley. The men had made much of these stops, for the people here were taller and healthier, and two of the women light enough of skin that they were nicknamed “the Spaniards” by the men. As a Christian commander, Cristoforo had to pretend not to know what else was going on between the sailors and the women who came out to the caravels. Some of the tension of the voyage eased at Paradise Valley. But not for Cristoforo, who counted every day’s delay as that much better a chance for Pinzón to arrive first in Spain.

  When Cristoforo finally got them moving, it
was by sailing in the evening and hugging the coastline, where the breeze from shore counteracted the prevailing easterlies and carried them smoothly eastward. Even though the nights were clear, it was a dangerous business, sailing at night on an unfamiliar coastline, for no one knew what hazards there might be beneath the water. But Cristoforo could see no choice. It was either sail west and south around the island, which could be so huge that it would take months to circumnavigate it, or sail at night on the shore breezes. God would protect the ships, because if he didn’t, the voyage would fail, or at least Cristoforo’s part of it. What mattered now was getting back to Spain with glorious reports that concealed the disappointing amount of gold and the generally low level of civilization, so that Their Majesties would outfit a real fleet and he could do some serious exploring until he found the lands Marco Polo had written of.

  What bothered Cristoforo most, however, was something that he could not explain even to himself. During the days, as they lay at anchor and Cristoforo worked on charting the coast, he would sometimes turn away from the coast and look out over the open sea. It was then that he sometimes saw something out on the water. It would be visible only for a few moments at a time, and no one else reported seeing it at all. But Cristoforo knew that he had seen it, whatever it was—a patch of water that was slightly different in color from the water around it, and several times a shape like a man standing half in and half out of the water. The first time he saw the manshape, he immediately remembered all the Genovese sailors’ tales of mermen and other monsters of the deep. But whatever it was, it was always far out to seaward, and came no closer. Was it some spiritual apparition, some sign from the Lord? Or was it a sign of the enmity of Satan, watching, waiting for some chance to disrupt this Christian expedition?

  Once, just once, Cristoforo caught a glimpse of light as if whatever it was had a glass of its own and was watching him as steadily as he was watching it.

  Of this Cristoforo wrote nothing in his log. Indeed, he tended to dismiss it as a sign of some slight madness brought about by tropical latitudes and the worries about Pinzón. Until disaster struck in the early hours of Christmas morning.

  Cristoforo was awake in his cabin. It was hard for him to sleep when the ship was sailing so dangerously close to land, and so he stayed awake most nights, studying his charts or writing in his log or his private diary. Tonight, though, he had done nothing more than lie on his bed, thinking about all that had happened in his life so far, marveling at how things had worked out despite all adversity, and finally praying, giving thanks to God for what had looked at the time like divine neglect, but now looked like miraculous shepherding. Forgive me for misunderstanding you, for expecting you to measure time by the short moments of a man’s life. Forgive me for my fears and doubts along the way, for I see now that you were always at my side, watching over me and protecting me and helping me to accomplish your will.

  A shudder ran through the boat, and from the deck came a scream.

  Kemal watched through his nightsights, hardly believing his good fortune. Why had he ever worried? Weather had been the cause of Columbus’s delays in the prior history, and the same weather determined his progress now. Waiting for favorable winds had brought him to this spot just past Cape Haitien on Christmas Eve, within fifteen minutes of when he had arrived in Kemal’s former past. The same currents and similar winds had caused the Santa Maria to drift onto a reef, just as before. It was still possible for everything to work just right.

  Of course, it had always been the human factor, not the weather, that was expected to change. For all the talk of how a butterfly’s wing in Beijing could cause a hurricane in the Caribbean, Manjam had explained to Kemal that pseudo-chaotic systems like weather were actually quite stable in their underlying patterns, and swallowed up random tiny fluctuations.

  The real problem was the decision making of the men on the voyage. Would they do what they had done before? Kemal had watched the sinking of the Santa Maria a hundred times or more, since so much depended on it. The ship sank because of several factors, any one of which might be changed on a whim. First, Columbus had to be sailing at night—and to Kemal’s relief, he was consistently doing just that in order to fight the trade winds. Then, both Columbus and Juan de la Cosa, the owner and master of the ship, had to be belowdecks, leaving the piloting of the ship in the hands of Peralonso Niño—which was proper enough, since he was the pilot. But Niño then had to take a nap, leaving the helm in the hands of one of the ship’s boys, giving him a star to steer by, which would be fine for an ocean voyage but was hardly helpful when sailing along a treacherous and unfamiliar coast.

  In the event, the only difference was that it wasn’t the same ship’s boy—from his height and manner, Kemal could tell even at a distance that this time it was Andrés Yévenes, a bit older. But whatever experience Andrés had would hardly help him now—no one had charted this coast, so even the most experienced pilot wouldn’t have known that shelves of coral would be so close to the surface without making any visible change in the sea.

  Even this had still been recoverable even in the prior history, for Columbus immediately gave orders which, if they had been obeyed, would have saved the ship. What really sank the Santa Maria was its owner, Juan de la Cosa, who panicked and not only disobeyed Columbus’s orders but made it impossible for anyone else to obey him. From that point the caravel had been doomed.

  Kemal, studying de la Cosa from the beginning of his life to the end, was unable to discover why he did such an inexplicable thing. De la Cosa never told the same story twice, and obviously lied every time. Kemal’s only conclusion was that de la Cosa had panicked at the prospect of the ship sinking and had simply got away as quickly and effectively as possible. By the time it became obvious that there was plenty of time to take all the men off without serious danger, it was far too late to save the ship. At that point, de la Cosa could hardly admit to cowardice—or whatever his motive was.

  The ship shuddered from the impact, then listed over to one side. Kemal watched anxiously. He was in full scuba gear, ready to come in close and put an explosive charge under the caravel in case it looked as though Columbus was about to save it. But it would be better if this ship could sink without inexplicable fires or explosions.

  Juan de la Cosa stumbled out of his cabin and clambered up to the quarterdeck, not quite awake, but definitely inside a nightmare. His caravel had run aground! How could such a thing have happened? There was Colón, already on deck and angry. As always, Juan was filled with anger at the very sight of the Genovese courtier. If Pinzón had been in charge, there would have been no such nonsense as sailing at night. It was all Juan could do to get to sleep at night, knowing that his caravel was coasting a strange shore in darkness. And, just as he had feared, they had run aground. They would all drown, if they couldn’t get off the ship before it sank.

  One of the ship’s boys—Andrés, the one that Niño fancied this week—was offering his pathetic excuses. “I kept my eye fixed on the star he pointed at, and kept the mast lined up with it.” He looked and sounded terrified.

  The ship lurched heavily to one side.

  We will sink, thought Juan. I will lose everything. “My caravel,” he cried out. “My little ship, what have you done to it!”

  Colón turned to him with icy coldness. “Were you sleeping well?” he asked acidly. “Niño certainly was.”

  And shouldn’t the ship’s master be asleep? Juan wasn’t the pilot and he wasn’t the navigator. He was just the owner. Hadn’t it been made clear to him that he had almost no authority, except as bestowed on him by Colón? As a Basque, Juan was as much a foreigner among these Spaniards as Colón himself, so that he got condescension from the Italian, contempt from the Spanish royal officers, and mockery from the Spanish sailors. But now, after having all control and respect stripped away, it was suddenly his fault that the ship ran aground?

  The ship listed further to port.

  Colón was speaking, but Juan had trou
ble concentrating on what he said. “The stern is heavy, and we’ve dragged onto an underwater reef or shelf. We’ll make no headway forward. There’s no choice for it but to warp the ship off.”

  This was the stupidest thing Juan had ever heard of. It was dark, the ship was sinking, and Colón wanted to try some stupid maneuver instead of saving lives? That’s what you’d expect of an Italian—what were Spanish lives to him? And when it came to that, what was a Basque life to the Spaniards? Colón and the officers would get first call on the boats, but they wouldn’t care what happened to Juan de la Cosa. While the men would never let him into a boat if they had a choice. He could see it, had always seen it in their eyes.

  “Warp the ship off,” said Cristoforo again. “Take the launch out, carry the anchor to sternward, drop it, and then use the windlass to draw us off the rock.”

  “I know what warping is,” Juan answered. This fool, did he think he could teach seamanship to him?

  “Then see to it, man!” Cristoforo commanded. “Or do you want to lose your caravel here in these waters?”

  Well, let Colón give his orders—he knew nothing. Juan de la Cosa was a better Christian than any of these men. The only way to get all the crew off was to bring the Niña’s boats over to help. Forget drawing the anchor out—that would be slow and time-consuming and men would die. Juan would save every life on this ship, and the men would know who cared for them. Not that braggart Pinzón, who selfishly took off on his own. Certainly not Colón, who thought only of the success of his expedition, never mind if men died in the doing of it. I’m the one, Juan de la Cosa, the Basque, the northerner, the outsider. I am the one who will help you live to return to your families in Spain.

  Juan immediately set several men to lowering the launch. In the meantime, he heard Colón barking orders to furl the sails and free the anchor. Oh, what an excellent idea, thought Juan. The ship will sink with sails furled. That will make a huge difference to the sharks.