The Mammoth Book of Historical Whodunnits Volume 3 (The Mammoth Book Series)

by Mike Ashley

  Sea of Darkness

  Sarah A. Hoyt

  One of the great forgotten European heroes is Prince Henry of Portugal, known as Henry the Navigator. He was the son of King João of Portugal and, through his mother, was a grandson of the English John of Gaunt. He lived from 1394 to 1460 and much of his life was as a result of the wars between the Portuguese and the Muslims – again we are back to the continuing spectre of the Crusades. Henry, or Henrique as we should call him, established a school for navigators and erected an observatory. It was thanks to Henry’s efforts, education and finances that the islands of Madeira were discovered in 1418, the Cape Verde Islands in 1446 and the Azores in 1448. Most of Henry’s efforts were put into exploring the west coast of Africa, but it’s possible that some of his navigators ventured further west and could have reached America before Columbus. Henry was driven not just by the desire for discovery but for the determination to spread the Christian faith against the growth of the Muslims.

  Though now resident in America, Sarah Hoyt was born in Portugal and is of Portuguese descent. Local legend has it that her mother’s family is descended from Goncalo Mendes da Maia, the Portuguese kingmaker. She has published three Shakespearean fantasy novels, starting with Ill Met By Moonlight (2001), which was shortlisted for the Mythopoeic Award, and has an historical mystery novel in the pipeline.

  “The body will smell, Your Highness,” the priest said.

  Father Alexandre was new in the village, a young man of gangly build. He went lurching down the uneven path over the cliffs to the beach, his black habit flapping like wings with his every movement – a crow of a man in the bright sunlight.

  Prince Henry, Infante of Portugal, his master and mine, followed behind, managing to walk smoothly and calmly over the same path looking cool and collected in the same black the priest wore.

  “We should have buried it, already,” the priest said. “Why Your Highness wants to pollute himself by going near a suicide’s body, I don’t understand.”

  Following behind, more reluctantly, I didn’t understand either. But then I was a 21-year old secretary of plebeian origin. In Prince Henry’s village, at Sagres, at the edge of the world, surrounded by learned men and cunning ones, I was used to not understanding most of what happened. And my prince’s mind was a mystery to me, as it was to most.

  Prince Henry – or as the local parlance went Infante Anrique – the third son of the late king of Portugal and brother of the current one, rarely explained his ideas or his motives to anyone.

  A large man, or at least large for the Portuguese mold, he wore black tunic and hose and – outside – a broad-brimmed black hat. Between tunic and hat an average face appeared: high bridged nose and square chin, generous lips and eyes narrowed against the glare of the same sun that had tanned the skin a reddish gold.

  His paternal grandmother had been a farmer’s daughter, impregnated by Don Pedro, king of Portugal.

  But my prince’s mother was Philippa of Lancaster, from the islands of Britain. Though I knew little of the history of those distant lands, it was said that Queen Philippa’s father had been a prince named John of Gaunt, whose ambition and intelligence made him eclipse even the kings he ostensibly served. And my prince was his mother’s son.

  His being the third son of a king, it would have been easy for Prince Henry to lead a life of leisure. Dispensations could be sought for his vows as Master of The Order of Christ. He could have had any pleasure he craved, carnal or otherwise.

  But Prince Henry moved upon a different tide. In him the craving for power and dominance had turned to a longing to master the unknown ocean – those lands that learned men marked as terra incognita, those oceans they charted as Sea of Darkness.

  The prince said he wanted to take the light of Christ to those lands. He said he wanted to claim them for Portugal.

  But I thought his ambition was more than faith or love of country. I’d been his secretary for five years, I’d seen him peruse maps and send ships off, then wait with anxious hope for their return and I thought I understood him. He wanted to uncover the world with trembling hand and to possess it naked and whole in his mind’s eye. What mortal flesh could compare to that? What earthly pleasure could compete?

  This thirst had led him to build this village – Vila do Infante – the scattering of white houses behind us. His ambition had ran his purse bare to populate those plain, square houses with learned men – Christian and Jew and Arab, cartographer and ship builder and inventor of nautical instrument.

  His anxiety for his village had brought him here, running to the beach, at the report of a drowned man found upon the sand, wearing clothes fine enough to belong to one of the apprentice discoverers at the school.

  The priest complained and the prince remained silent past the road and onto the rocky ground, then past that, to where the dunes rose that hid the flat, white-sand beach beyond. Between the dunes I caught a glimpse of the emerald sea and was filled with a sense of eternity.

  The ancients believed this land, Sagres – which they called the Sacred Promontory – was at the edge of the world and the beginning of never-ending ocean. My prince believed differently. If he was right –. If he . . .

  “I will go no further,” the priest said and stopped, where rock met sand. He turned to look at us. He had pale skin and curiously hard features, the features of a spoiled noble youth who’d been hemmed – possibly against his will – into the discipline of the Church and God’s service. He crossed his arms on his chest. The sensuous mouth gone hard opened to pronounce unforgiving words. “It is just a suicide, Milord. We’re not commanded to give him charity nor Christian burial. He is but refuse and should be disposed of as such.”

  Silently, the prince walked around the priest, onto the soft, white sand and removed his fine-suede court slippers. Flinching at the heat of the sand on his feet, he walked gingerly into the whiteness of the dunes.

  I took my slippers off and followed. For a moment it looked as if the priest would put out a hand to stop me, but his half-started movement stopped and I ran past, catching up with the prince.

  “Ah, Tiago,” he said, as I caught up. “Do you know who the unfortunate is?”

  I shook my head. I thought of Luis who hadn’t been seen in the village – nor even in the tavern outside it – for a week but I shook my head. There were three or four young men who’d disappeared over the last month, in just such a way.

  Young men aged anywhere from fourteen to twenty-one – and older men too – came here to learn the skills they hoped would make their names as great discovers of new lands. And just as many left, dismayed that such heroic deeds required that they learn to read, to interpret maps, to calculate a course. Luis could not be dead. He’d been too afraid to meet me, that was all. Afraid of what I might truly know. Doubtless, he’d left in the night without even taking his effects and was now somewhere in Spain. Conferring with his masters . . . I bit my inner cheek, wondering what he was telling them and if any of it – anything he’d learned about maps or navigation – would be of use to them. I hoped not. I’d given him warning. A chance to escape. And a chance for me to get fair Leanor’s attention in Luis’s absence.

  The prince stared at me, and the silence weighed heavy between us.

  “No. Some fishermen found him and brought the alarm to the village. They said men from the school were keeping watch,” I said. “And that he was dressed as one from the school.”

  Prince Henry inclined his head sideways. “And yet Father Alexandre is so sure he is a suicide.”

  I bit my lower lip. Indeed. How else could a young man from the school drown? After all, most were all from families from the extreme North and extreme South of Portugal, families that of necessity survived by fishing and probably smuggling and piracy. They all could swim like fishes. And they never went to sea from the school itself, save in training boats with a large crew. No loss from those boats had been reported. So, what other way could one of them have drowned, but self mu
rder, jumping from one of the precipitous cliffs around the village into the sea below?

  But I was not about to correct the prince. I held my silence.

  Descending the dune, on the other side, my feet sliding on the loose sand, I caught a whiff of rotted meat laced with that peculiar sweetness that marks human cadavers – that stench that our body recognizes as a smell of our own mortality.

  I hesitated, but Prince Henry went on, adjusting his stride to climbing down the hill, slippers in hand. I could only follow.

  It was low tide. The sea had deposited the corpse on the sand, then retreated, as though appalled at its daring. Before us, the beach opened as a wide expanse of sand, most of it wet. Near the sea, two young men stood by a dark bundle sprawled on the sand.

  As we neared the stench grew worse and the bundle resolved itself into a human body. It lay sprawled on the sand, arms wide like Christ on His cross. The hair was reddish, the body large. It wore a fine dark tunic and stockings.

  At first I thought the corpse had belonged to an enormously fat man, but then I realized it was merely swollen with gases. Likewise, up close, I could see the hair was not red; something had made red highlights gleam on the dark strands. Long green tendrils of seaweed wrapped the head like a macabre headdress.

  The young men beside the body were my age or just about. They were Pedro and Miguel Aguila. I knew them well. Oh, not from our normal duties or interaction in the course of our chores. No. But a few of us had taken to frequenting the tavern outside the village, after our round of daily work was done. Brothers from the far North and looking like it, Pedro and Miguel were dark-haired young men with ruddy cheeks and dark eyes who looked much like the Castillians on the other side of the ill-defined northern border with Spain. Miguel, the older one, was good at dice, a power to be reckoned with at the gaming tables and, as such, always flush with money. And Pedro was good with an improvised rhyme and had a strong, melodious voice that turned many a head in the tavern. Including Leanor’s. The innkeeper’s fair daughter had been paying Pedro a lot of attention since Luis had left. I thought of the blonde beauty leaning on his broad shoulder and sighed. My plan had not worked as I’d hoped.

  Prince Henry walked right up to the corpse, looked down at the pale, bloated face, and grunted as if he’d found something of interest. Setting his slippers down beside him, on the wet sand, he started examining the corpse. He ran his large, reddish hands along the corpse’s clothes, felt the spongy skin and pulled aside the curtains of crimson-stained hair.

  Prince Henry’s hands were tanned and callused, and this was how he always used them, like an extra pair of eyes, picking up instruments, and tracing outlines on maps with his finger. It was as though the blood of his working-man ancestors running in his veins made him incapable of understanding anything he could not feel and touch.

  I approached hesitantly. The stench was worse. It was a taste in the mouth, a sense of salty, rotting dampness to the flesh, a knot at the throat. I suspected it would stay with me long after I left the corpse behind. Not all the perfumed oil in the world would rid me of it.

  The prince felt around the greyish, swollen neck, and brought forth a silver chain. The chain held a locket. The prince’s blunt fingers – skilled at manipulating small objects as very large hands sometimes were – opened the catch, revealing a lock of blond hair.

  Prince Henry looked interested, but I flinched, because the hair was the colour of a walnut shell. Like Leanor’s. The prince probed further. From within the sleeve, pressed close by the swollen flesh, he brought forth a small satchel of oil cloth, of the type all of us had and all of us used, to keep letters or tokens we didn’t want wet in the course of our daily duties – since our daily duties, even mine, often took us to the shipyard at Lagos where the prince was building his new type of ship, his caravel.

  Delicately, the prince pulled at the pouch and extracted from it a single sheet of paper. I recognized the handwriting and the paper – a small piece of a sheet I’d plundered from the prince’s scriptorium – from the edge of one of his own letters.

  I knew the line the prince was reading: I know all. Meet me at the church well before the afternoon mass.

  I looked closer at the corpse’s face trying to see beneath swollen flesh and loose grey skin, past the empty eye sockets and the teeth that showed in a rictus. And thought it was Luis, after all. Luis Vilalonga, whatever his real name was.

  “You know him?” the prince asked, turning towards me. “You know him, Tiago?”

  The sound of a surprised gasp hung in the air between us. I realized it had come from me. My tongue felt thick and dry as cork in my mouth. I swallowed hard.

  I knew Luis. I knew more about him than anyone else here did. If what I knew about him became known . . . If it became known that I had told him to meet me in a secret location. If it were known he’d never appeared . . . Oh, I would be lost. They would think I had killed him. And yet the prince had the note and he knew my handwriting. Lying would not save me.

  My voice sounding, to my own ears, as if it came from a great distance, I said, “Yes. His name is Luis Vilalonga. He came from the North . . .” And there I faltered and stopped, unable to tell the truth and unwilling to tell a lie.

  The prince’s gaze remained trained on me, as though looking into my soul. “Do you know any reason why he’d kill himself?” he asked.

  Thoughts came to my head in tumult. Because I’d found his secret. Because he knew I was willing and able to use his secret against him.

  Some sense of self-preservation kept me from saying it. But neither could I manage to utter what I would normally have said, under the circumstances. That he might have been bested at love. That he might have lost a great sum at dice. Instead, I bit my lip and shook my head.

  And the prince smiled, a pleased smile as if I’d performed a very clever trick. “That is good,” he said, approvingly. He turned back to the corpse and pulled at the black, bloodstained hair. He spread the hair showing a wound beneath – a smooth indentation in the skull and broken skin from where vast quantities of blood must have flooded to stain the hair.

  “That is good,” he said. “Because this man didn’t kill himself, you see. See the blood that stained the hair? There had to be a lot of it, for it not to be completely washed away in the water. That means he was not dead yet when he received this wound. Any man who’s been to war knows dead men do not bleed freely.”

  “But,” Pedro said. “Perhaps he hit his head on a rock when he fell?”

  “No. The wound is too smooth. A rock would have left a jagged wound. Whatever caused this wound was smooth and rounded, probably a man-made instrument. Which means Luis Vilalonga was murdered.”

  I expected the call. After the prince had ordered the corpse taken to the church, for proper funeral mass and Christian burial, after we’d returned to the prince’s house, I expected the call. And the call came. Diogo, the prince’s elderly servant, came for me in my room and said, “Tiago, the prince wishes to speak to you.”

  Thus I found myself in the scriptorium, where my master sat at his desk which was strewn high with parchment, paper, and strange instruments, some quite new and some looking brittle and frail.

  The room was dim and cool, because this house was built as the natives built in sun-drenched Algarve, with mosaic floors, tall ceilings and narrow, high windows which allowed ventilation but kept heat and light out. The prince had a lit oil lamp hanging beside his desk.

  He’d removed his hat and the light of the lamp shone yellowish-pale on his dark, thinning hair.

  “Sit down, Tiago,” he said, softly.

  I looked around for a place to sit, amid the broad wooden trunks piled with manuscripts, the narrow writing tables piled with manuscripts and the piles of manuscripts on the floor. Many a time I’d seen my master pluck a single fragment of vellum, a single sheet of paper from the middle of this seeming confusion. But to the rest of us it was nothing but unnavigable chaos.

  “I be
lieve there’s a stool there, in the corner, under those Moorish maps from Ceuta,” the Prince said.

  I walked to the corner like a man in a dream and started pulling the paper – Moors used paper more than we did – from atop the stool.

  “Please keep them in the same order if you can,” the prince said.

  Something of his calm, slightly amused voice, finally penetrated my skittering thoughts and steadied my trembling hands. The prince didn’t think I’d committed murder. I’d seen Prince Henry in high dudgeon, filled with righteous rage over lying or self-aggrandizing of one’s knowledge. Over drunken revelry. Over wastefulness.

  Did he but even suspect I’d killed Luis, his voice would have been such as to flay my skin from my bones. Or make me wish it did.

  Breathing deep, I brought the three-legged stool, stood it in front of the prince’s desk, and sat.

  Prince Henry was still looking at me with the same deep calm. And perhaps I just imagined the glimmer of amusement in his dark eyes. “Tiago, what do you know about Luis? That you didn’t tell on the beach out there?”

  “I – Milord, I –” I said, trying to piece a lie that wouldn’t discredit me.

  The prince’s eyebrows arched. “Tiago, cease. I know you’re not guilty of murder. I knew it out there on the beach. Had you killed the man you would have told me there was some reason for him to commit suicide. Having stooped to take human life, you’d not have hesitated to cover your crime with a lie.”

  “Milord, there might have been,” I blurted, “a reason for him to commit self-murder. Look, I knew Luis no better than I knew most of these men,” I said. “All the young men who come here to learn, most of whom give up after some months.”

  “Because they’re swaggering little fools, with minds unused to learning,” the prince said.

  I swallowed and made a gesture, not quite a nod. Most of the young men who came here didn’t even know how to read and write and were neither prepared for nor tolerant of the prince’s demand that they learn. “Well, normally I only see them when they come to you with their recommendation letters from family or friends, and then when I cross their path in the street or in the yards, and, unless one of them distinguishes himself in some way, not again until the young man leaves. If he takes leave of you.”