“I can try,” said Rich — the whinny of a horse told that they were drawing near to them.
“Did you find him?” asked an unknown voice. “Yes,” said García, and then to Rich: “Mount.”
Rich felt in the darkness for the stirrup, and with the effort usual to him he hoisted up his foot and got it in. By the time he had swung himself into the saddle Moret was already mounted; García sprang into the saddle of the third horse. They began to move along a path — the unknown Ramon, who had been waiting with the horses in front, followed by Rich and García, while Moret brought up the rear. The horses blundered along in the darkness; Rich felt his face whipped painfully occasionally by branches, and his knees received several excruciating knocks. For a space his mind was too much occupied with these troubles, and with the necessity of keeping his seat in the saddle, to have any thought to spare for the future, but as soon as the forest began to thin, and the rising moon gave them light to an extent quite remarkable compared with the previous blackness, he inevitably began to wonder once more. Suddenly a new aspect of the situation broke upon him, with a shock which made him sweat and set him moving restlessly in the saddle.
“Mother of God!” he said. “The Holy Name sails tomorrow. You will let me get back in time to sail in her?”
The first reply he had was a light-hearted chuckle from Moret behind; the question seemed to amuse him immensely. García allowed a painful second or two to elapse before answering.
“No, my pretty one,” he said. “You will not be sailing in the Holy Name. Rest assured about that.”
‘Assured’ was not at all the right adjective to describe Rich’s mental condition. There was bitter disappointment at the thought of not returning to Spain, but his other doubts overlaid that at the moment; he was intensely puzzled. It could hardly be ransom that these kidnappers were seeking; they must know that in the island he possessed practically nothing that anyone could desire. Then it occurred to him that perhaps he was being carried off to give legal color to some plan they had in mind. They might be intending to force him to construct some binding agreement regarding their grants of land.
“I will do nothing,” he announced stoutly, “to distort the law for you. I have my professional honor to consider.”
Moret seemed to find this announcement extremely funny too. He broke into high-pitched laughter again; Rich, who could not see him, could imagine him writhing convulsed with merriment in his saddle.
“Be damned to your professional honor,” said García. “Do you think a man like me needs a lawyer to chop straws for him in this island?”
“Then why, in the name of God . . .?”
They wanted neither his wealth nor his legal services, and he could think of nothing else they could want of him. Unless perhaps — it was a most uncomfortable thought — they wanted him as a hostage. If that were the case his doom was certain; nobody of the Admiral’s party would lift a finger to save him. The sweat on his face felt suddenly cold, and he shuddered in the warm night.
“We want you — ” began García, slowly.
“It’s too good a joke to spoil yet,” interjected Moret, but García ignored him.
“We want you as a navigator,” said García.
“As a navigator?”
“Didn’t you hear what I said?” snapped García.
“But I’m no navigator,” protested Rich. “I know nothing about it.”
“We saw you on the voyage out,” said García. “The Admiral was giving you lessons. You looked at the sun every day through his astrolabe, and at the stars each night. You were enough of a navigator to lecture us about it. Or have you forgotten?”
Rich certainly had forgotten until he was reminded of it.
“But I could no more take a ship to Spain — ” he began.
“Spain? Who said anything about Spain? It’s west we sail, not east. And I’ll warrant you could find your way to Spain, too.”
“Holy Mary!” said Rich, faintly. “Sainted Narciso of Gerona!”
He was too stunned for a space to say more, but slowly realization came to him.
“I will not go with you,” he burst out. “I will not. Let me go back. Please. I beg of you.”
He writhed about in his saddle, entertaining some frantic notion of flinging himself to the ground and taking to his heels. The sound of a sharp whir of steel behind him made him refrain; Moret had drawn his sword and was ready to cut him down. He forced himself to sit still, and from that he proceeded to force himself to appear calm. He was suddenly ashamed of his exhibition of weakness; it was especially shameful that he should have been guilty of an undignified outburst before men like García and Moret, whom he despised. And — such is human nature — there was the faint hope growing in his breast already that he might yet escape.
“What is the plan?” he asked, steadying his voice.
“A week back,” said García, “we caught an Indian. He is not of this island, although our Indians can understand him. He is taller and stronger, and his lower lip has been cut off in a V, so that we call him el Baboso, the Slobberer.”
“But what has he to say?”
“He has told us of a land to the north and west, a vast country full of gold. Gold vases and gold dishes. There are vast palaces, he says, reaching to the sky, and the chiefs have their clothes sewn all over with precious stones so that in the sunshine the eye cannot bear their brightness. That is where we are going. We shall bury our arms elbow-deep in gold dust.”
“But in what ship?”
“The caravel Santa Engracia lies less than twenty leagues from here. Her captain is dead of fever, and her crew tried to run off, but we have caught four sailors who can work the sails, and now we have you to navigate her.”
“My God!” said Rich. “I suppose Roldan is captain?”
Moret giggled again behind him.
“Roldan? Good God, no! Who would want to sail under that lout? It is I who am captain, as you will do well to remember in future. We are twenty gentlemen of coat-armor, and we shall carve out our own empire in the West.”
The first thought that came up in Rich’s mind as he considered all these amazing statements was that the whole expedition was grossly illegal. Only the Admiral or those licensed by him had any right to explore the Indies; anyone else who should do so offended not merely against the Admiral but against the Crown. The gallows and the block awaited such offenders on their return. But a resounding success and a prodigious treasure might avert the penalty.
The immediate reaction to that notion was one of wonder at the incredible hardihood or rashness of those who had conceived the notion. Twenty gentlemen of coat-armor, forsooth, four sailors and a lawyer, were presuming to sail in a ridiculous caravel to ‘carve out an empire’ in a land wealthy enough to build palaces reaching to the sky. It would be a very different matter from the conquest of the helpless and lovable Indians of Española.
But this story told by the Slobberer with the missing lower lip had a chance of being true. It sounded a more likely tale than any Rich had yet heard; the facts that the Slobberer was of a different breed and that he was mutilated in a fashion unknown in these islands constituted valuable evidence that his story was not like the wild tales which the Admiral had first gathered, of Cibao with its golden mountains and of the valley of emeralds. The Slobberer might have some authentic knowledge of a real kingdom which certainly ought to be found in a north-westerly direction; if not the kingdom of the Great Khan, then at least a dependency of it.
For a moment Rich felt a sensation almost of pleasurable excitement at the thought of such an adventure. He had to catch himself up suddenly and bring down his thoughts to a matter-of-fact level. How could he possibly navigate a ship from Española to China or Cipangu? Perhaps, as García had in mind, the sailors would know how to trim the sails and attend to the other details of the practical handling of the ship. Perhaps he himself was capable of estimating the speed of the ship, and with the needle he would know something o
f her course. The astrolabe would give him a notion of their position relative to the equinoctial and at least make a rough allowance for its variation, or perhaps there was a copy of the table on board the Santa Engracia. That would be a check on the other calculation, and would help him in the matter of allowing for currents and leeway and the uncertainty of the needle. Vaguely, very vaguely, he would have some sort of notion as to where they were. He could never hope to find his way back to Española if they wanted to return, but he could at least turn the ship’s head and sail her eastward — eastward — eastward until he had found Africa or Spain or Portugal or France or even England. The Old World was too big a place even for him to miss.
Then, like a cold douche, common sense returned again. The whole plan was too mad, too insane. How could he be expected to handle a ship, with only his sketchy theoretical knowledge? There would be all kinds of emergencies to deal with — he remembered how the Admiral had brought the Holy Name through the Serpent’s Mouth and then through the Dragon’s Mouths. He could not handle a ship like that. He knew nothing about beating to windward off a lee shore. He did not have the practiced seaman’s uncanny knack of guessing the trend of a shoal from the successive casts of the lead. These hot-headed Spanish caballeros had no conception at all of the difficulty of the task they proposed to set him — if for no other reason, because they were accustomed to the Admiral’s phenomenal seamanship.
“I never heard of such a ridiculous plan in all my life,” he burst out.
“So that is what you think?” replied García. There was a polite lack of interest in his manner.
“Yes!” said Rich. “And what’s more — ”
Nobody appeared to listen to what more he had to say. The horses broke into a trot, and Rich, joggling about in his saddle, found his flow of eloquence impeded. He knew then that nothing he could say would deter these hotheads from their plan. Nothing would induce them to set him free to return to San Domingo and the Holy Name. He relapsed again into miserable silence, while the horses pushed on in the darkness, trotting whenever their fatigue and the conditions would allow, and walking in the intervals. Fatigue soon came to numb his misery. He was sleepy, and an hour or two on horseback was quite sufficient exercise for his soft limbs. The men of iron who rode with him had no idea of fatigue. The loss of a night’s rest, the riding of a dozen leagues on horseback, were nothing to them. Rich bumped miserably along with them through the night; before dawn he had actually dozed once or twice in the saddle for a few nightmare seconds, only saving himself from falling headlong by a wild clutch at his horse’s invisible mane.
Chapter 20
At dawn García broke his long silence.
“There’s the Santa Engracia,” he said. The path had brought them down to the sea’s edge here, and the horses were trotting over a beach of firm black sand over hung by the luxuriant green cliffs. A mile ahead a torrential stream notched the steep scarp, and in the shelter of the tiny bay there lay a little ship, a two-masted caravel, her curving lateen yards with their furled sails silhouetted in black against the blue and silver sea. There were huts on the beach, and at their approach people came forth to welcome them. There was Bernardo de Tarpia and Mariano Giraldez, Julio Zerain and Mauricio Galindo — all the hot-headed young gentlemen; Rich could have listed their names without seeing them. There were four or five swaggerers whom he did not know; he presumed they were followers of Roldan whom he had never met before, and the notion was confirmed by the raggedness of their clothing. There were a few depressed Indians, and one with a gap where his lower lip should have been, through which his teeth were visible; this must be el Baboso, of whom García had spoken. There were a dozen Indian women whose finery proved that they were the mistresses of Spaniards and not the wives of Indians.
“You found him, then?” commented Tarpia. “Welcome, learned Doctor Sailing Master.”
“Good morning,” said Rich.
He was sick with fatigue and fright, but he was determined not to allow the young bloods’ gibes to hurt him visibly. If the inevitable really were inevitable, he could cultivate a stoical resignation towards it. His mind went off at a tangent, all the same, refusing to face the present. It groped wildly about trying to recall half-forgotten memories of some learned Schoolman’s disquisition on the intrinsically inevitable as compared with the inevitable decreed by God. He slid stiffly off his horse and looked round him, dazed.
“Gold and pearls and emeralds!” said young Alfonso de Avila, clapping him on the shoulder. “And no grubbing in the earth for them, either.”
It was extraordinary how the lure of easily won gold persisted, despite disillusionments. But young Avila was excited like a child about this new move. He was babbling pleasurably about the kingdoms they were going to assail, and the glory they were going to win; for him the treasure would be merely a measure of their success, just as a lawyer’s eminence might be roughly estimated by the size of his fees.
García’s voice broke through the chatter.
“Everybody on board,” he said, curtly. “We may have Roldan or the Admiral on our tracks at any minute. Tarpia, take charge of Rich.”
The longboat lay beside the beach; the Indians pulled at the oars — the hidalgos could not sink their dignity sufficiently to do manual work as long as there was someone else who could be made to do it for them — and within five minutes of García’s order Rich was hoisting himself wearily up over the side of the caravel. João de Setubal, the eccentric Portuguese, was there, and three or four others; apparently their duty had been to prevent the escape of the remaining four seamen.
“Here’s your crew, Sailing Master,” said Tarpia.
The four seamen grinned at him half nervously, half sullenly. It was clear that the new venture was not at all to their taste. Rich looked as sullenly back at them. The sun was already hot, and pained his eyes; he felt the Santa Engracia heave under his feet as a big roller lifted her.
“Who are you?” he said. “What service have you seen?”
They answered him in Catalan, like sweet music after the harsh Castilian. They were fishermen from Villanueva, pressed the year before for service on the Ocean. They could reef and steer, and had spent their lives at sea.
“One of you must be boatswain,” said Rich. “Which is it to be?”
Fortunately there seemed to be no doubt about that. Three thumbs were pointed at once to the fourth man, the blue-eyed and broad-shouldered Tomas — stoop-shouldered, too, for middle age had begun to curve his spine.
“Tomas, you are boatswain,” said Rich. It was a relief to have found someone on whom he could fob off some of his responsibility.
The second boatload from the shore was already alongside; García had come with it.
“Don Narciso,” he said, “the horses have to be got on board.”
They were swimming the horses out the short distance from the shore behind the longboat; even at her bow waist the Santa Engracia’s rail was six good feet above the water’s edge. Rich looked at Tomas in panic.
“Shall I get the slings ready, sir?” asked Tomas.
“Yes,” said Rich.
The sailors pelted up the shrouds; there was tackle already rove on the yards — apparently they had been hoisting in stores and water yesterday. The slings were dropped to the boat, and passed under the belly of one of the horses.
“Here,” said Tomas to a bewildered Indian standing by. “Tail on.”
The ropes were pushed into the hands of the Indians, and, under Tomas’ urging, they walked away with them, and the horse, plunging helplessly, rose into the air. Tomas himself swung the brute inboard, the Indians walked cautiously forward again, and the horse was lowered into the waist. It was amazing how easy it was when one knew exactly how to do it. At a word from García half a dozen young hidalgos took charge of the beasts — there was nothing undignified or unknightly about attending to horses when necessary. To learn how to do so had been part of the education of every hidalgo in his boyhood.
“We are ready to sail now, Sailing Master,” said García.
This was all mad, unreal. It must be a nightmare — it could not really be happening to him, the learned Narciso Rich. As though battling with a nightmare he strove to postpone the moment of departure; he felt that if only he could postpone it long enough he might wake up and find himself back in San Domingo, about to sail for Spain in the Holy Name.
“But what about stores?” he asked. “Food? Water?”
“We have spent the last week collecting food,” said García. “The ship has dried meat, cassava and corn for forty people for two months. There is forage for the horses, and every water-cask is full.”
“And charts? And instruments?”
“Everything the captain had is still in his cabin. He found his way here with them from Spain when he came with Ballester.”
To the Indies Page 21
