by Austin Bunn
“What do you see?” the English conscript said to him, teeth clacking. Piss had spilled down his right legging and his swagger had gone with it.
Diego did not reply. He had his tongue and his wit but was as mute as a fish. Much as I felt for him, Diego has never spoken my name. Can you love something that you never name?
We found him grinning on the steps of the cathedral, a drunk Franciscan friar, tonsure gone prickly. A spray of freckles fell across the bridge of his nose and vanished under whiskers, his face an admixture of boy and man. The friars said that he’d been silent since he entered their order and had never taken to cloistered life; instead, he kept the garden full of flowers that brought the birds, then the cats, until a plague of aphids finally brought it to ruin. He was round as a cask and the captain, searching for crew, asked him to join us as a cook, pointing down to the banks of the Guadalquivir, to our expedition ship, with her royal flags sharp in the wind. Diego’s gaze went out, past the sails of the barques and the harbor riot, toward an unseeable shore.
How is it that some men inspire no feeling in me while others stir the deep waters? On those cathedral steps, I took his right hand, smooth as calfskin, and he pressed his left against the outside of mine, so that my hand was held in a gentle, warm prayer. I felt my blood rise up, the way a bulb of quicksilver feels in a pot of boiling water. He pointed to my ginger hair and made a flickering motion of fire with his fingers. I smiled like an idiot. And if Diego did not speak, his hands were more fluent than any words. He practiced a religion at the cook box, the communion of salt pork and sea fish, all that mattered. And at night, in shadows, those hands made other blessings. Now, at the bulwark, Diego looked eager and expectant. As if this encounter was his whole reason for coming.
The deck bell rang. Captain Veragua came to the entrance to his quarters. In the daylight, he was plainly dying. He wore a hood, white eyes shining from the shadow like marble. On our second week at sail, the captain had stupored on wine and a candle in his cabin tipped in a swell, setting his bedclothes and doublet alight. He jumped overboard and when he was fished from the water, his left side looked like a hank of meat rescued from embers. It took two days for Diego to pare the seared cloth from the captain’s skin with a carving knife. Every command he gave to us now was curt and purposeful, trimmed to the minimum amount of gesture.
“Peralonso,” the captain asked me, “what is that sound?”
My attention went to the sails. The wind had worn out; the main and the fore drooped without breeze. The ship’s planks creaked in complaint. The sea slapped lightly against the Elena. We had entered a white calm, the horizon crouched behind a mist. But as I listened, below all of this came a faint, wide roaring, like the rumor of a waterfall. It stretched the width of my perception.
“Land?” I answered.
The captain ordered the deep-sea lead hove overboard again. The lead, at one hundred fathoms, failed to find bottom. The brothers recalled the line, spliced a second to the first, and sent that into the sea. Again, the rope drifted behind in the current. The sea was too deep to sound.
Then the captain called for the crows to be released. They cawed up in their cage, high on the mast. Marco scampered up the rope ladder and released them. The birds circled higher and higher, hunting shoreline. As land birds, they hate travel over seawater. But they continued to circle until we could not make them out.
“Listen,” the captain said.
Soon enough the drone was all I could hear. The Elena drifted in a weak current. Slowly, as the world reaches focus through a looking glass, the mist thinned and revealed itself as a great spume of ocean water. One league away, the curve of horizon straightened to a line, to a drop, like the edge of an enormous table. Clouds bent over this line and disappeared.
Coralito, the Elena’s frail navigator, crossed himself and went to the captain, our sail chart spindled in his hand. He was an old and difficult man, a widower, too vain to admit his fading eyesight. Long white eyebrows billowed from his face, like puffs of sweet weather. But aged as he was, Coralito was the Elena’s will, our human compass. At the Talavera Commission in Salamanca, he watched Queen Isabella decree, on a carpet of maps, that the world was a plate ringed by water and that to traverse this lip from Spain to the Indies would take three years. Under his breath Coralito had muttered, What do priests and Queens know of science? The world is not flat, but as round as a ball of wax and as knowable. You can leave a place, travel a line, and arrive where you began.
“What did you say?” the captain asked.
“I have failed you, Captain,” Coralito said. “I was wrong.”
The crows returned and settled noisily on two belaying pins.
“We have reached the edge of the ocean,” Coralito continued. “We can go no further. This is the fourth corner of the world.”
Every man is born to his first corner. Mine was a pile of flour sacks in a house in the port of Seville, in the year 1469, under the reign of King Ferdinand of Aragon. That year, my father, a blacksmith, was conscripted into the armada marvallosa in the English war and lost at sea. He returned to my mother as one thousand maravedis of wheat grain, the compensation for her sacrifice. Desperate and poor, my mother bricked in his furnace, hand-ground her grief into powder, and opened a bakery.
Every morning, I rose to find her kneading the dough, and I will always remember her ghosted with this fine white dust, cool and papery to the touch, haunting a passage to and from the oven. She was a striking, sad beauty, her hair gathered in a silver band. Countless men needled me in an effort to get her attention and force a smile on her. But none could tempt her out of the downward stare of her solitude.
“You must never leave me,” she would say, flattening my hand against her cheek. “One day you will want to. It will be a girl with gray eyes, or a distant shore. That day, you will count all the things that are keeping you here and they will not be enough. That day will be my last.”
My mother gave me the gift of letters. When I was thirteen years old, she led me to a field of goldenrod and covered my head in a shawl. She told me I must study a new book and make new prayers. I asked, “Who are we praying to?” and she said, “To the God of Israel, your true people.” That afternoon, I became two: a Catholic, the faith of my father, and a Marrano, Jew by candlelight.
Soon after, the butcher came on afternoons to sit me on his lap and write letters on a slate. He read the words aloud while I repeated them. Sometimes he would whisper made-up words in my ear, or put my hand on his belly to show me how breath worked until he sighed. I delighted in this, but my mother sent him away. “You’re too old for such things,” she said. I wept inconsolably for a loss I felt but couldn’t bring into words.
Over time, my mother’s bakery grew to serve the harbor, preparing tack and meal for sea journeys to and from the Levant, the terminus of the spice road. It was my task to deliver the breads to the barcas and navículas anchored in the river. I grew to love the crowded port, so dense with ships that I could hardly see the water. There were many familiar faces, salted in every crease, and crabs savoring the treacle on dry-docked hulls. The port felt like a floating city of fathers: exuberant, bronzed men, barefoot and dressed only in trousers. They taught me knots, the mysteries of splicing and parceling the cordage, even as they pilfered my breads. Many asked if I wanted to join their crews, but only if I could assure that their hardtack would never worm.
I was tempted. The sailors spoke of the Spice Islands, the Moluccas, and their incomprehensible bounty. They had seen the moon dyed orange by windblown curries, palms scorched betel-red. Along the coastline, the air was so heavy with pepper you had to breathe through cloth. It seemed to me that these spice villages harvested delirium, and the lives there were surely made of pure color.
Once, the boldest I ever was, I stole into the hold of a docked caravel. Twenty barrels sat lashed to the floor. One barrel had been knocked open, revealing a rubylike powder. Mace, the fine netting on the nutmeg shell. I’d
seen it in the market, a spice so treasured that a tablespoon is worth a week’s labor. I tasted it with a finger. I felt that I was savoring a quality of dusk.
Just then, a mariner stepped from the shadows. He was broad-shouldered and grimy, as if he’d been swimming in the bilge. I stumbled back, afraid. He motioned for silence and slid closed the lid of the barrel. From the deck, I heard the mainsail catch in a gust and felt the ship pull.
We stayed that way, in stillness, until I broke free and launched myself out of the hold. Seville was already some distance behind. The crew, surprised by a stowaway, laughed at my terror—I’d never gone to sea, never learned to swim. A hand shoved me overboard, into the water, and I could hear their pleasure at my thrashing. The shoreline disappeared from my view, and I was sure to die.
Without warning, a thick arm wrapped around my neck and I found myself dragged to the surface, then to the riverbank. I vomited water into my lap. My rescuer, the man from the hold, stared back at the ship as it coasted down river. Our swim had transformed him, washed him clean. How supple and pale his skin was, with inky hair tufting along his arms. He took a bandoliered wineskin out from under his shirt—the cork had popped and the wineskin was swollen with water. He poured it and the water ran clay-red. The stolen, ruined mace. The thief shook his head and tossed the skin into the current. We said nothing.
I brought him back to my mother’s shop. My mother was gone and we lay on my bed of flour sacks to dry. He held me tightly, his arm belting me from behind, as Diego has done, as if I were on the verge of falling. There are many ledges that split this world, between the known and the unknown, and we choose to go over. While the thief slept, I watched his pulse tick in a vein in his forearm, a single cord snapping taut then loose in neat, regular meter. I was more awake than I’d ever been. It is said the celestial spheres chime as they roll against each other. In just this way, my body vibrated against his. I knew then I would leave my mother and join his world, the world of men.
The Elena drifted at the ledge. We continued with the watches, four hours to a shift, all heads listening for a catch of canvas. But no breeze filled the sails, and a small, inexorable current pushed us toward the drop.
At evening, the hard sun sank below the ledge. With the Elena hove to and sideways toward it, the English conscript took a crossbow—he was now inseparable from it—and fired an arrow over. It dropped silently out of view. Alfredo told him he “had missed” and fired another. It too vanished.
At half a league’s distance from the ledge, the captain—from his bunk—ordered all the ballast dumped from the ship and the crew to mount the sweeps. We would row the Elena back into whatever trades had brought us here. With our barrels of supplies adrift around us, the crew dug the oars in the water the entire night. I laid my quill in the ledger and joined Diego to pull. We sat next to each other on a bench, and in the darkness, he laid his hand atop mine.
Our interpreter, Pinzón, was afraid the motion of the oars would call the serpents. We set torches along the gunwale, but spotted nothing. Perhaps even the serpents recognized the precipice, the way certain fish know to stop at the mouth of the Guadalquivir and go no further. Despite our hours rowing, the Elena’s prow made no progress. The current toward the ledge was too strong.
The captain called out to me. Inside his quarters, he lay dressed in a long, loose tunic, Coralito kneeling at his side. From the hem, Captain Veragua’s withered legs stuck out long and rigid as fork tines. He seemed to have lost half his weight.
“How far are we?” he asked. “Coralito cannot see the distance.”
“I should think we will meet the ledge in two days’ time,” I said.
The captain closed his eyes. In the faint light, I made out on his shirt the spottings of blood and grease, where Diego had applied fat as a salve.
“Drop the sea anchors behind us,” the captain ordered. “And bring the longboat.” He lifted himself up and winced. “Dress me, Coralito,” he said.
I did as I was commanded, though his intentions were unclear. I woke Alfredo and Armando to cast the sea anchors. The broad canvas sacks hit the water and swelled. They would slow our drift nearly to a stop, but we would no longer be able to turn and sail. Next, I led the longboat that trailed the Elena up amidships. Without sail or mast, the longboat was designed for short islanding journeys. It was a glorified rowboat, shadeless and exhausting. Didn’t the captain know we were a thousand leagues from home? Or had his mind fevered past reason?
“You can’t row that to Spain,” the English conscript said, a slick rat wriggling in his hand. “Not without miracles.”
“We’re not going back,” I said and tied the line of the longboat to a pin.
Pinzón paced the deck, scratching the back of his hand until it bled. “We must be cursed. Some sin lives aboard this ship.” He saw me then, his eyes begging me. “Where is the sin, Peralonso?”
The English conscript slit the throat of the rat and held it over the water by the tail as it thrashed and the blood drained into the sea. “Tell him, boy. You know where.”
Pinzón looked back and forth, puzzled. A narrow flame coiled inside me, burning away my breath. “My heart is pure,” I said.
He brandished his wet knife. The rat went still. “Is that what Diego likes? Your purity?” he said, tongue flickering between his teeth. He hammered his knife into the gunwale and dug his fingers under the flesh as he tore the skin from the body.
The captain tolled the bell. He winced in his officer’s trousers, a pouch in his hand, and I fell in with the gathering crew, happy to leave the conscript to his work. “Let us give thanks to God who has thought us worthy to discover such a great wonder, this ledge,” the captain began. He shook the pouch. In the sack, he explained, were beans representing the crew of the Elena, and among them were four marked with crosses, four great honors. Each of us would come and take a single bean and those that pulled a cross would strike out for the ledge.
The men eyed one another. Our captain had admitted that our great expedition was folly. The countries we knew were the only countries. But what unimaginable vale awaited us over the ledge? What did it feel like to fall forever?
The sack was passed from man to man. The English conscript went first, and though I prayed for fortune not to visit him, he smiled and showed his smooth bean. When Diego pulled his, he made no expression, which I took for luck. The carpenter Ginés pulled the first marked one and Pinzón the second. He rushed to the captain.
“I’m not a seaman, nor have I any skill with a bow,” Pinzón pleaded. “I will be a failure to the crew of that small boat.”
The captain rested his charred hand on Pinzón’s shoulder. “Every country, every animal speaks a language. When we return, you will tell with your best words what you have seen.”
“But this plan is death.”
The captain said back, “You shall be rewarded. Or face the lash.”
I went last. On the surface of the final bean, I felt the markings of a knife. The last cross.
The captain asked, “Who is the fourth man?”
I looked to Diego, and he must have seen the fear in me because he then stepped forward, casting his bean off the side. He would take my place and leave me alive.
The captain said, “We will leave at dawn.”
As the crew scattered across the deck, sinking into their privacies, I felt a cutting mix of shame and loss. I had been made a coward. The men began to pray for deliverance, for the opportunity to see their fathers and wives and children again, for an everlasting life that I could not understand. I knew only the ache of the present. I thought of my mother pulling a tray of alfajores from the oven, scored with the Hebrew letter for righteousness. “The world begins the day we are born,” she told me, “and the world will end the day we die.”
Under the torchlight, I found Diego on the forecastle, staring out at the drop alone. He looked calm and peaceful and welcomed me with a pat on the deck beside him.
“Why Diego?
” I whispered. “Why did you save me?”
His eyes were soft. To my amazement, he took the ledger from my hand and lettered slowly. I had never seen him use a quill. For the first time, I heard his voice.
“YOUNG,” he wrote and pointed at my chest. “MORE LIFE.”
“But you have life too,” I said. “Why are you not afraid?”
He took up his lettering again. “SOMEONE I WISH TO SEE.”
A shudder traveled along my spine. Then Diego clutched me, and I felt a finality, as if he were trying to give over whatever part of him I hungered for. He felt solid and strong and then he was gone, crossing the deck to the cook box. Until dawn, he stoked the fires, preparing a breakfast of breads, served with the captain’s jars of prunes and jam. I came to him. “Diego,” I started, unsure of how to shape into words an ocean of feelings.
He pressed his pinched fingers at my lips. The last time I felt him alive. Powdered cinnamon dusted my mouth and exploded into a rounded, delicious silence.
At dawn, the crew mounted a torch to the prow of the longboat and cinched the long fathom line to an oarlock. The line would run from the longboat to the Elena, to keep it tethered. When the preparations were done, Diego and Ginés lowered the captain into the boat and set him in the bow. In his hand, he held the queen’s letters of introduction. At stern, Pinzón pleaded upwards. He’d spent the night writing letters to his wife. At dawn, he burned them all and wrote one to his mistress in Madrid, a letter he sealed with wax and swore me to deliver.
The sun rose as they set out, their oars slapping into a waveless ocean. The hemp line unspooled in lazy jerks. The captain peered out from the bow, his eyes fixed on the approaching ledge. Diego rowed and rowed, never looking up at me though I yearned for some last contact. On the Elena, no one spoke as the longboat shrank into the distance. When the second knot on the line passed over the gunwale, Alfredo called out, “Two fathoms gone!”
