Ferron nodded. He glanced at James and made a curt sign of the cross to him with two upraised fingers. ‘And I’m glad you are here at this moment of triumph, madam. Even now King Fernando is composing his letter of jubilation to the Pope, I’m told. Oh, I should introduce my mudejar.’
The Moor smiled. ‘I am Abdul Ibn Ibrahim. By profession I am an astronomer. Today I serve the friar.’ He said this without apparent bitterness.
Ferron said, ‘Actually he is attached to the staff of the emir in Granada. The emir has sent a delegation to Ronda to witness the enactment of the treaty of capitulation. We do try to be civilised about these things. And so I am shadowed by this mudejar. Well, he is useful; his Latin is quite good.’
James introduced himself. ‘And this is the lady Grace Bigod, of Buxton - we are from England.’
The Moor’s eyes glinted. ‘I know who you are.’
It was a remark that puzzled James. But Abdul said no more.
Ferron said, ‘Ah, the Queen is nearing us ...’
They applauded as Isabel with her retinue continued her progress down the road.
Ferron watched admiringly. ‘I’ve met her several times. A remarkable mix of courage, piety, and sheer glamour! In her way, you know, she is as valuable to the cause of Christendom as ten thousand knights, for the men love her in a way they will never love Fernando, though they admire his cunning and leadership. And she is competent too. Since the fall of Ronda she has already rededicated the main mosque, and ordered cart-loads of sacred books and crosses to be shipped in from Cordoba and Seville, along with good Christian settlers to occupy the abandoned properties. Thus she has completed the city’s conquest by her cleansing.’
James asked pointedly, ‘And the Jews and conversos? Are they to be cleansed too?’
Ferron smiled thinly at him. ‘Torquemada is here himself.’ Torquemada was now the Grand Inquisitor for all of Spain. ‘Even with Brother Torquemada’s famed efficiency, the courts have yet to process more than a handful of cases. But we are making progress.’
James’s soul turned at this brusque summary. Since he had last visited Spain he had found out more about Ferron, who, as it turned out, was from a converso family himself - and Grace, of course, likely had her veins polluted by Saracen blood. Was this why they were so enthusiastic about the Inquisition’s dreadful cleansing? For no matter how hard they scrubbed, they could not remove the impurities from their own bodies.
Ferron went on, ‘In the meantime, lady, we have business to discuss. I told you the Inquisition has ears and eyes everywhere. We are almost as ubiquitous as God Himself, our admirers say - and our enemies. I believe we may have found your Dove. Come, we must talk.’ He offered his arm, and they walked off, without looking back to see if James and Abdul followed.
XIII
Friar Ferron escorted them to the palace of the Moorish governor of Ronda, called the Mondragon, which had been given over to officers of the Inquisition. The palace was only a short walk along the road that followed the cliff top. They walked through light-filled rooms to a colonnaded courtyard, and then passed on through a horseshoe arch into a small garden that overlooked the cliff itself, with a remarkable view of the flood plain below.
The mudejar Abdul brought out a tray of tea.
Grace glanced at Abdul. ‘Are you sure it’s safe to talk of these matters in front of him?’
‘The mudejar? Of course. He is an ambassador to one defeated Moorish city from another which soon will be defeated. What harm can he do? We will speak freely, and forget he even exists.’
Grace leaned forward eagerly. ‘Tell me of this Dove, then.’
Ferron said, ‘I cast a net for men of his sort, and have caught what looks like a promising fish. He came to our attention - I mean the Inquisition’s - because he intends to travel to Cordoba, to the monarchs’ court, where he hopes to present his case.’
‘A case to do what?’
Ferron smiled. ‘To sail the Ocean Sea. To go west, if he can.’
‘Then such a man exists,’ Grace breathed.
‘Oh, yes. He was born in Genoa, this man, the son of a clothier. He is now thirty-four years old. It seems he was educated in a school run by the clothiers’ guild. But his learning is poor,’ he said dismissively. ‘He was restless, as many of that Italian breed are. He ran off to sea; he served on ships from his youth. He has sailed to Chios in the Aegean, and as far as Iceland in the Ocean Sea; he has visited Ireland, England, Flanders, and sailed down the African coast. He became a competent navigator, mapmaker and ship’s master, it seems. He made his money from his petty bits of commerce, as men of his kind do.
‘But his fortunes changed, this poor Dove’s, when he made a good marriage. He wed into a noble Portuguese family called Perestrelo. And this is where the dream was born. For his father-in-law, who died before the Dove married his daughter, served as a captain during the colonisation of Madeira, led by Henry the Navigator. The Perestrelos were given some land on the island of Porto Santo, off Madeira. Here it was that our Dove settled with his wife, and he began to go through his dead father-in-law’s maps and accounts of his explorations. He learned first hand how a new land may be made to turn a profit for its discoverer, and the nation that sponsors him.
‘And his eyes were drawn west. Porto Santo, I am told, is a haven for those who sail out into the fringe of the Ocean Sea in their little ships, explorers hunting down the African coast, slavers seeking a supply base. And many of them bring back tales of marvellous lands which lie to the west, always just out of sight ...’
Out of all these fragments, in the head of the clothier’s son, a most remarkable dream was born.
Ferron said, ‘Perhaps if you sail west and keep on sailing, it would be more than new lands, new Madeiras, that you would find. For if the world is round, then perhaps you could sail around it. Perhaps you would end up coming around the curve of the earth and arrive in the east ...’
James was astounded. He was educated; he knew his geography, and the shape of the world. But this was a category of journey that had never occurred to him before. ‘Can it be possible?’
‘Oh, yes,’ Ferron said. ‘Why, it was a dream of Pedro, elder brother of Henry the Navigator, half a century ago. And there are strong commercial reasons to try it. Some say that if the Muslims block the way to the east - well, then, on a round world, perhaps a route can be found to the far east, by sailing west.’
‘And that is the Dove’s dream,’ Grace said.
Ferron sneered. ‘You can just see this little man, the jumped-up Genoan, his poorly educated mind struggling to make sense of the tavern legends he so credulously devours. But he is devout, I’ll give him that. It’s not just trade he’s after. He’s said to have concocted a scheme to contact the Mongol Khan, if he still reigns, and to persuade him to join an attack on the Islamic states from the east. Our clothier’s son dreams of liberating Jerusalem!’
‘All right,’ Grace said. ‘But so what? You say men have had this sort of dream before. What makes this “Dove” different?’
Ferron said, ‘For one thing, the plausibility of his case. The seed of his dream may have been travellers’ tales, but he has been trying, in his dogged, uneducated way, to assemble a rational case, based on the testimony of the ancients and other arcana. Second, he has added a gloss of a divine mission, which will appeal to our monarchs. You could even see it as fitting in with the greater project of the Hidden One to rule the whole world; after all you must discover a land before you can conquer it. Third, there is his sheer determination. Anybody who has met him says this of him. He is obsessed where those who went before him were not, and he may succeed in his dream of going west merely because of that.’
‘Or perhaps,’ James said, ‘he just wants to get out from under the shadow of his father-in-law. That would be human.’
‘Well, if he wants to impress his wife he’s sadly too late,’ Ferron said. ‘She died last year, leaving our Dove with a chick, a son. Perhaps that deat
h released our dreamer from the damp prison of Porto Santo. Within months he had travelled to Lisbon and petitioned the Portuguese court to fund his westward expedition. In return he wanted a share of the profits, a hereditary nobility and to be named governor of any lands he found.’
Grace smiled. ‘This little man thinks big.’
‘You can’t blame him for that. Joao turned him down. He left Portugal - although that may not be unconnected to the fact that his wife’s family were implicated in a murky little plot to assassinate the King. And so, early this year, our Dove came to Spain. He’s here now, in a little port called Palos. And as I say we’ve learned that he intends to come to Cordoba to present his case to the monarchs.’
Grace nodded. ‘And you do believe he is the figure predicted in Eadgyth’s Testament?’
‘Oh, yes.’
James said, ‘His father was a clothier, you said, friar. What kind of clothier?’
‘A weaver. This man is the son of a weaver. Just as your prophecy says.’
And James remembered the line: the spider’s spawn. The weaver of a web.
Abdul asked, ‘And if I may, what is his name?’
‘His Italian mother called him Cristoforo, his Portuguese wife Cristovao. In his workaday commercial Latin he is Christophorus. We in Spain must, I suppose, call him Cristobal.’
‘Christophorus. Christo ferens,’ said Grace slowly. ‘The Christ-bearer. And the surname?’
Ferron smiled, anticipating her reaction. ‘He will be called Colon here - Colombo in Genoa and Portugal - Columbus in Latin.’
Grace clapped her hands, delighted as a child. ‘Columbus—the Dove! Can it really be as simple as that? The spider-spawn, the Christ-bearer, the Dove - Christopher Columbus!’
But James, shocked, thought there was nothing simple about a four-hundred-year-old prophecy coming true.
Ferron said, ‘Well, it seems that all hinges on this man. Spain is drained by war; the monarchs won’t buy everything that is presented to them. If this man is funded to go west, they will not spend on your engines - as I am coming to believe they must, if the world’s final war is to be won. What we must do, then, is recruit this Dove, this Colon, to our cause. We must make him forget the western Ocean. We must make him long for the engines, and the glorious war to come.’
‘“And the Dove will fly east”,’ James breathed.
The mudejar Abdul was staring intently at Ferron, absorbing every word.
XIV
Abdul Ibn Ibrahim, a big, heavy-set man, his sailor’s face leathery and creased, would have looked out of place in London, Harry thought, even if it hadn’t been for the turban on his head. He had come to England to tell Harry and Geoffrey what he had learned of this man, this putative Dove, Cristobal Colon.
Colon had joined the court of the Spanish monarchs at Cordoba. ‘The monarchs have turned the capital of the caliphate, a city of scholarship, into an armed camp, the headquarters of their war on the Moors,’ Abdul said bleakly. ‘It is full of weapons shops, everywhere soldiers drink and whore, and in the shadow of the mosque drums beat, horses parade and the armies of the nobles stage mock battles ...’
When he had first landed at the small port called Palos, seeking somewhere safe for his child to stay, Colon had settled on a Franciscan priory called La Rabida, outside the town. It was a lucky stop, for he quickly found allies in the priory’s father superior, Juan Perez, and in a visiting brother called Antonio de Marchena. These two had become stout supporters. And it was a letter from de Marchena of Palos that had served as an introduction to the Queen’s confessor.
So Colon got his chance to present his petition to the monarchs’ council. But this was quickly rejected.
‘He was turned down for his sheer implausibility,’ said Abdul. ‘This Colon is not a scholar, and when he gets into debates about the shape of the world with sea captains and geographers, it shows.’
But Colon showed the qualities of iron determination of which the Testament hinted, ‘heart stout, mind clear’. He found a way to make a direct appeal to the monarchs.
‘And he immediately snagged the attention of Queen Isabel,’ Abdul said. ‘After all she has Portuguese ancestry. Colon’s father-in-law went exploring in the Ocean Sea with Prince Henry, the Queen’s own great-uncle. I think her blood was stirred at the thought of doing some exploring of her own.’ He raised an eyebrow. ‘He is a handsome man too, striking. And a lusty one. I’ll say no more than that!
‘The monarchs were interested, despite the implausibility of his case. I think it was Colon’s wild promises of gold from Cathay that most attracted them. The monarchs need funds to fight their war against Islam.’
Geoffrey asked, ‘Then they might support his case?’
‘They have appointed a junta, a commission of geographers and navigators and sea captains, under the leadership of the Queen’s confessor, to investigate his proposition.’
To Harry, all this was the stuff of a personal nightmare. He felt this figure, Colon, was emerging from a mist of chaos, from the Testament’s obscure old language, from the ramblings of his dying ale-soaked father, into the cold light of actuality.
Geoffrey sensed his unease. ‘Have courage, Harry.’
Harry tried to focus on the practical. ‘Is there any sense in this talk of crossing the Ocean Sea in the first place, and of vast unknown empires? If not, we can dismiss it all as fancy.’
Geoffrey asked, ‘What do you think?’
Harry shrugged. ‘I’m no navigator. The journey I made from London to Malaga was my longest sea voyage. I only know what I’ve heard.’
‘Which is?’
‘That the world is a dangerous place. The Romans called the Ocean Sea the Mare Ignotum, the unknown, and not for nothing. They say that to the west is a Sea of Doom, a place of vast whirlpools that can crush a ship like a fly in a child’s fist. If you go south towards the equator you sail into the Torrid Zone, where the sun’s heat turns you black before the flesh boils off your bones. And the world is not a sphere, as the ancients believed, but a sort of pear-shape, with a great extension to the extreme east where the earthly paradise resides.’ He felt uncomfortable, as Abdul listened to this in cold silence. ‘This is what has been said by mariners to me.’
‘All right,’ Abdul said. ‘But what mariners? Europeans, that’s who, who have barely ventured out of the puddle that is the Mediterranean. But the Chinese have gone much further, and learned much more ...’
And he spoke of his time on the treasure ships.
‘You should have seen them, cousin. They were not like our little ships at all. Like floating cities, they were, with a great square bow at the front, topped by serpents’ eyes. Nine masts bore huge red silk sails. The ships were built in compartments, so they could not be sunk. They had holds full of preserved food, and immense tanks of fresh water, and they grew soya beans on board, and they kept otters in their holds to catch fish - they could stay at sea for months! And the officers enjoyed banquets and dances, and the company of courtesans.
‘It’s all gone now. There was upheaval at court, a fire in the Forbidden City, a lot of bad omens - the eunuch admirals were retired, the ships broken up. The mandarins at court adhere to the principles of tao - order, stability, harmony of all things. That sort of thinking doesn’t sit well with the exploration of the unknown. I suppose in the end the Chinese decided China is world enough for them.
‘But in the heyday of these tremendous ships, only a few decades ago, the Chinese ventured far over the oceans - around India, as far as the coast of Africa, and to the south-east, where they discovered huge masses of land and strange peoples unknown to Europeans.
‘Listen to me. I once met a man who had worked in the Forbidden City. In a zoo there, he said, the eunuch explorers had brought back specimens from a dry southern land. There were strange skinny people with black skin and flat noses and curly hair. There were trees that kept their leaves and shed their bark. There were huge creatures with faces like a deer’
s and back legs like huge levers, that carried their young around in a flap of skin on their belly...’
Harry smiled. ‘I too have heard such tavern tales.’
‘All right, all right. I’ll tell you this. The Chinese learned far more about the shape of the world than any European, thanks to us Moors, and thanks to their own expertise.
‘Do you know any navigation, cousin? To fix your position on the round earth you need to know two numbers, your latitude and longitude. Latitude tells you how far north you are of the equator. That’s easy. You just look for how high the Pole Star is; the higher in the sky, the further north you must have sailed, until it would be over your head if you sailed all the way to the north pole itself.
‘Longitude, the angular distance travelled east or west, is trickier, for the sky itself spins about the earth. The Chinese developed a method using eclipses of the moon. Such events are visible all across the world. A legion of astronomers scattered across the world, all studying the elevation of the stars at that precise moment, would be able to map the earth’s curve—’
Harry held up his hands. ‘Enough. I’m better at figuring accounts than the geometry of the stars.’
‘My point is that the Chinese know how big the world is. And they would tell you that it would be a long journey if you were to try to sail west from Lisbon, say, to China. But on the other hand,’ Abdul said thoughtfully, ‘that big Ocean Sea has plenty of room for an unknown continent or two. The Chinese never sailed far enough to find out.’
Geoffrey thought this through. ‘Then you’re saying,’ he said carefully, ‘that the prophecy of the Dove, the invasion of Europe by people from the west, could have a basis in truth.’
‘I’m saying it’s not impossible.’ Abdul looked at the two of them. ‘All this will take years to come to fruition, one way or another. The monarchs have other matters to deal with before they fund Ocean crossings. And the Engines of God need development before they kill anyone save by accident. We have time yet to deflect history’s course.’
Navigator Page 27
