The Mapmaker's Daughter

by Laurel Corona

  One day is like another on the cape—although I know I’ve missed Shabbat if we come into Lagos, the only real town near us, and I hear the Sunday bells ringing. It makes me sad to have drifted away from Mama’s ways, because it feels like losing her a second time, as if there is a place beyond the grave where the dead disappear only when they become strangers to the ways of the ones they left behind.

  The rock I am sitting on feels jagged and hard now, and my throat is dry. I shift my weight, and my bottom feels numb. Tareyja will worry if I am late for dinner. I start back toward Chuva. “Are you ready to go home?” I stroke her nose and lean my head into her mane, and she whinnies to say she loves me too as we head up the path for home.

  ***

  When I come back to our compound, I see a horse wearing the regalia of Prince Henry’s court tied up outside my house. I leave Chuva with Martim and hurry to see who is here. I feel guilty for being gone so long, because my father will have trouble communicating with whoever has come from Raposeira to see him.

  Papa has rolled up his new map and is slipping it inside a leather case when I come in. “He’s been summoned,” the messenger tells me.

  Before Martim has a chance to remove Chuva’s saddle, I am back astride and accompanying my father to Raposeira. We ride past white-sailed windmills and small farms, through grain fields and pastures dotted with cork oaks, across creeks and along ridges looking down to the sea, until an hour or so later, we arrive at Prince Henry’s palace.

  It’s really no more than a large house, nothing like the Duke of Medina-Sidonia’s residence, where I used to interpret for my father. The first room is a vestibule with a stone floor covered with fresh straw to catch the dirt from people’s shoes. Except in the worst weather, the heavy palace doors are open, and dogs wander through, sniffing in the corners for scents and making water to mark their spot.

  Anyone can come in this first room, but except for petitioners during set hours, only Prince Henry’s guests can cross the threshold to the antechamber. Inside, wall sconces and heavy iron standards hold lit torches day and night, but the light is dim enough that I have to stand close to the wall frescoes to see the details. One shows caravels heading across blue seas, carrying the banner of Portugal atop their masts. Here and there, a sea monster lifts its head and mermaids cavort—scenes that must have been painted before Prince Henry decided such things are foolish. The other fresco shows the Moorish ramparts at Ceuta, on the north coast of Africa. Led by the prince himself, Portuguese troops with banners and shields blazoned with crosses are routing the Moors, and flames rise from the besieged citadel.

  Off the antechamber is a banquet hall big enough for no more than ten or fifteen people, because the prince does not entertain large groups. He is always dressed exquisitely and expects the same of those in his service, but a meal at Raposeira is no grander than at the inns where we stopped on our journey to Portugal, with pewter plates, soup, and heavily watered wine. I’ve heard Prince Henry wears a hair shirt next to his skin, and I suppose the meager fare and the shirt are part of something God demands, though I don’t understand why the Holy One would make someone a prince and then not let him enjoy it.

  If I were a princess, I would have a huge palace. Perhaps if Prince Henry had a wife, she would insist on it. It seems odd he isn’t married, and I think he must miss having sons, since he seems partial to several of the young squires who attend him. A few go with so little protocol into the most private recesses of the palace that it seems as if it is their home as much as his.

  My father told me that Henry chose a life of chastity as a young man, and he has never known a woman. He’s the head of the religious fraternity known as the Order of Christ, and though he hasn’t taken vows, he thinks he should set a good example by being chaste like the others. It would be rather pleasant to see women at court though. If he had a wife and daughters, someone might notice that I have outgrown all my dresses and need new shoes. As it is, I am invisible at my father’s side.

  The squire ushers us out of the antechamber into the bedroom, the largest room in the palace, where the prince holds his audiences. Around a large table are a half-dozen men, most of them middle-aged like the prince, except one, Diogo Marques, who looks to be eighteen or twenty.

  Prince Henry is standing in the middle of the group, poring over a roughly drawn navigator’s chart. I recognize three of his sea captains as frequent visitors to Raposeira.

  “Senhor Riba,” the prince says. “Show us what you have, even if it isn’t finished.” I point to Prince Henry, then to my eyes, then to the leather case where my father stores his work. He pulls out his new chart and lays it on the table.

  “Our latest ships went a hundred leagues beyond Cape Bojador and still haven’t found the mouth of the Gold River,” Prince Henry says, smoothing down the curling edges of the vellum. “It must be there. We have it on good authority in our sourcebooks.” My father has drawn the north and west coasts of Africa, including a river known as the Gold, which extends deep into the continent below Cape Bojador. Near the middle, it parts around a huge island Papa has labeled Insula Palola, a place some travelers’ accounts say is rich with gold.

  Prince Henry’s face is long and square. Green eyes look out from under a broad-brimmed, velvet hat from which a few curls, gray at the temples, have escaped. His most notable feature is his hands. His fingers are thin and fragile for a man, and his nails are always well trimmed. He tents his fingers when he is lost in thought and touches his palms together in a single light clap when he has thought of something that excites him.

  He is looking at the blank bottom of my father’s new map, devoid of anything but a rough outline to the south, representing the unknown reaches of the coast of Guinea, as the area below Cape Bojador is called. After running his finger off the lower edge of my father’s chart, the prince traces a straight line to the east. As he turns north and comes back onto the chart, he stops and taps his finger. “We should try to round Guinea—it cannot be much farther south than we have already gone.”

  He makes a semicircle inland to indicate a large bay whose top is just below where my father has painted Egypt. “The Sinus Ethiopicus,” Prince Henry says. “I don’t understand why none of the Saharan traders has heard of a bay that is supposed to be as big as a sea.”

  He looks at the group as if someone might have an explanation. “Perhaps there is no such place,” one of the men replies. “The traveler who described it has been wrong before. Some people doubt he visited many of the places he wrote about.”

  “Perhaps,” Henry says. “But the Saharan traders’ camels are laden with gold, and they get it from somewhere.”

  “Not from the sand,” another says, “unless they have greater alchemists than all of Christendom.”

  Everyone laughs, but Henry is too intent on my father’s chart to hear the joke. “If the Gold River is here,” he says, “we could sail almost all the way across Africa. We could set up outposts here”—he taps the farthest reach of the Gold River—“and here.” His finger marks the shore of the Sinus Ethiopicus. “Connect those two by a road over land, and we will unite the coasts of Africa. With that, we will control all trade with Europe from Africa and the Indies. More than that, we will have reached the kingdom of Prester John, and together we can drive the Moors out of Africa.”

  Prester John, the only Christian ruler in Africa, is said to have a standing army of ten thousand men and so much wealth in his empire that his foot soldiers go into battle with swords of gold. Prince Henry wants to join forces with him against the Moors, who control North Africa and still hold Granada. It’s a very good dream, but Papa tells me that until explorers find the bottom of Africa, it’s best not to count on sailing around it so easily. Until Henry’s men find the Gold River, it’s fruitless to think of getting to Prester John that way, if indeed such a river or such a man exists. “I draw what the prince tells me to,” he says, “and if he wants me to show a river that may not be there, I’ll do it. B
ut even a prince can’t make something real just by putting it on a map.”

  ***

  I am on Chuva, staring out to sea, when I glimpse the masts of Henry’s latest expedition growing tall on the horizon. I hurry back to tell my father, who sends Martim at full gallop into Raposeira with the news.

  Within a few weeks, Father has a new logbook to examine, with drawings and descriptions of more than a hundred leagues of newly explored coast. The Gold River, it seems, must be pushed even farther south, and the bottom of Guinea as well.

  The prince is undisturbed by this news and is not pressuring my father to finish. His attention is now focused on something else—the capture of Tangiers, a day’s ride from Ceuta on the north coast of Africa. Prince Henry is famous for having captured Ceuta from the Moors, but twenty years is a long time to see no further triumph for Christendom.

  He has been in Lisbon the last few months, convincing his brother, King Duarte, to attack Tangiers. Now that he has gotten royal approval, he is too busy to summon my father, and with no translating to do, I have little to occupy my time except daydreams. These I weave into fantasies about the life I would have if I weren’t an eleven-year-old girl living a solitary life on a cape at the end of the world.

  When I leave the house to go riding, it takes me awhile to get used to noise. My voice sounds foreign when I greet Martim, and Chuva’s soft whinnies seem to come from another world. Then, as my ears adjust, my senses start to tingle, and I feel the heat on my skin, the wind in my hair, the soft leather reins in my hand as if I were experiencing them for the first time. Then I am gone into a world of colors, textures, and sounds, where I roam, dizzy with imagination and spilling over with all the yearnings of my heart.

  Everything is music. I understand this in the drum of Chuva’s hooves, the syncopated crash of waves inside sea caves, the crackle of foam as waves recede around my toes, the calls of birds on the wing. Out here in the world of the hearing, I inhabit the place music comes from, part of one great soul from which Martim, Tareyja, and their friends pull their joyful cries and pained laments as they make music outside their cottage on summer evenings.

  Colors seem like living things, the spirits of ancient gods perhaps, lingering in the world like a taste on the tongue long after the food is gone. The sea, the cliffs, the beach, the point at Sagres change by the hour as if they are passing thoughts in the mind of something, someone, beyond all comprehension.

  The Holy One. I have never stopped believing in him. I don’t understand the idea that God wants to be worshipped one way alone, and when I feel overwhelmed by the immensity and beauty of his creation, I am glad my mother taught me to bless and praise him everywhere.

  My prayers and dreams are wrapped up together, vague and contradictory. “Let me leave my mark in the world,” I say to the air around me. I don’t want to feel so invisible, yet I’m torn between wishing to move away from this place and wanting it to be me and I it.

  I spend my days talking with lizards and birds, watching the clouds change shapes overhead, and acting out stories where I am a queen with magical powers, a warrior princess, or the only female sea captain the world has ever known.

  “Looks like a storm’s ahead.” I hold my spyglass as I peer at the horizon, my legs planted wide on the beach to withstand the rolling waves splashing over the bow of my caravel. “Steer away from shore!” Cape Bojador is half a league off the port side, and I see surf breaking off shore. “A reef! A reef! We’ll be dashed to pieces.” I leap below deck to take the tiller and use my powerful arms to turn the boat away. I see the cowering ship hands’ admiring eyes, for I am the famed Amalia of the Deep. My flowing locks whip in the wind, and my ample breasts heave inside my bodice. It’s up to me to save the crew and bring the ship back, its coffers overflowing with gold—

  “What are you doing?” Diogo Marques is standing on the beach a few paces away. He’s well dressed, as always, and though he is slender and not much taller than me, his shoulders look powerful. His calves, under the short, ballooning trousers and tight stockings favored at Henry’s court, are strong and muscular.

  “I—” My eyes fall to the ground in embarrassment. “I’m acting out a story.”

  “It must have been quite a tale.” To my relief, his smile seems curious rather than mocking.

  “Was I talking out loud?” I ask, fearing the answer.

  “No, but it looked as if you had something rather fearsome to do battle with.”

  His light brown hair is sun streaked, and his eyes are between green and brown, like moss. They glint as if thoughts are streaming through his mind too quickly to hang on to. His cheeks are rosy, and he is pretty like a girl.

  I’ve studied him so carefully because he is the only man at court younger than my father’s age. He is being groomed as a commander and has been named captain of one of the vessels in Prince Henry’s next expedition.

  “I really should be getting home.” Here on the beach, he seems unfamiliar and formidable.

  “Perhaps I could accompany you,” he says. “You live at Sagres, I believe?” He is acting as if I am a young lady, and I wish I had done a better job lacing my dress and braiding my hair before leaving the house.

  If only I were a little older and didn’t have a flat chest. If only my hands were milky white rather than covered with sand and calluses. But I’m just a girl who Diogo Marques would not notice if anyone else were here.

  I try to behave as grown-up as I can. I keep Chuva to a trot, holding my back very straight and doing my best to look knowing and imperious. I am exhausted from the effort by the time my house is in sight.

  Diogo points to the tower. “That’s what I came to see,” he says.

  “It’s hardly worth climbing the stairs. You get as good a view walking out to the point.” No one but me ever risks the tiny, slick steps, and I do so only when I am a captive princess or a witch brewing powerful spells from atop my domain.

  “I’ve been told that,” Diogo says, “but I thought I might see if the prince should post a lookout here. It’s not the best vantage point to watch for the Moors, but then again, we haven’t been about to go to war until now.”

  We reach the stables, and Martim helps me down. “Thank you for the pleasant company,” Diogo says, setting off without another word. I watch his silhouette in the tower as he takes in the sea and sky, and when he comes down, I run quickly for home so he won’t know I have been watching him.

  ***

  For the next few days, I stay close to the house, not wanting to miss Diogo if he comes for another visit. Then, just when I am about to shake away the fuzz in my head by taking a long ride on Chuva, I see a horse and rider go past our window. I jump up, spilling the contents of a cup of water on the front of my dress. I massage the spot until the moisture spreads enough not to be visible and make what I hope looks like a casual exit from the house.

  I see Diogo inside the tower. The excitement is too much for me, and before I can stop myself, I have climbed the steps and am standing next to him. “What are you doing?” I ask, realizing to my chagrin how obvious the answer is.

  “Prince Henry said to leave this here,” Diogo says, gesturing to the looking glass he is mounting. “He’s sent for a more powerful one for the harbor. He said that since there’s not much to do out here, perhaps your father could be a sentry.”

  My father could never handle the tower steps, and I am stunned that the prince would suggest it. It’s disrespectful, as if he doesn’t understand my father’s gifts and assumes any task would be suitable. I say nothing, determined that if my father is assigned this new duty, I will handle it myself, and no one at the palace will ever have to know.

  Diogo looks through the glass, pointing it here and there. “Would you like to look?” he asks.

  I squint into the eyepiece. Though the horizon is empty, whitecaps are visible far into the ocean, and if a boat were to sail into view, I would see the color of the sailors’ caps before I could see the ship at all w
ith my unaided eye. I turn to say something and am startled that his face is close to mine. “It’s quite good, isn’t it?” he says, backing away. “At sea, it’s how we sight land.”

  “If the Moors come, we will have plenty of time to prepare for them,” I say, trying to sound calm after having been so close to him.

  He smiles. “We’ll send you to that beach to lead the battle.”

  Embarrassed, I murmur something about Papa needing me and head down the stairs, taking pains not to tumble to the bottom in a heap.

  ***

  I spend hours watching the horizon through Diogo’s spyglass, wanting to be the first to spot a Moorish invasion. I spend as much time looking down the road toward Raposeira, to see if Diogo might be coming to check on his spyglass.

  It’s been more than a month since he was last here. At Raposeira, the talk is of Henry’s imminent departure for Lisbon, to lead an army massing for the assault on Tangiers. The idea of a lookout seems to have been forgotten, but nonetheless, I come up here every morning and again before sunset in hopes of sighting the Moors on the horizon.

  Diogo will be captain of one of the expedition’s ships. No one knows how long they will be gone, but it’s the beginning of August now, and since Tangiers is only a few days’ journey by sea, everyone hopes for a triumphant return by the end of September.

  I spend much of my time practicing being grown-up, hoping that my body will go along, and that by the time Diogo returns, I will have budded into a young woman. We have one silver tray in the cottage, and I take it into my room to look at my reflection. I turn my head from side to side to see how I might look if I were Diogo’s true love, awaiting his victorious return.

  I put down the tray. “Stop it,” I whisper.

  Susana has a husband, a little boy, and another child on the way. Luisa is only eight, but from Susana’s letters, it sounds as if she has settled on becoming a nun. I won’t be able to leave my father as long as he lives, since someone must take care of him.