The Seven Serpents Trilogy Read online

  To save space for cargo, the Santa Margarita was not outfitted with bunks nor hammocks. Except for Don Luis and Captain Roa, each man fended for himself, finding a soft plank somewhere on deck or below, if he was lucky.

  This, my first official day at sea, left me barely able to walk. As I located a place to lie down between two can noneers and was settling myself to rest, Don Luis sent for me. He and Captain Roa were just beginning their supper as I entered the cabin.

  “ ¿Qué pasa? What goes?” Don Luis said to me but did not wait for an answer. “I asked Captain Roa to lead you a merry pace. You have survived, I see.”

  “Barely enough,” I said.

  “Now you know what it is to work aboard a caravel. Something you have not known heretofore. Tomorrow I will give you tasks more to your liking.” And he went on to outline my new duties.

  At dawn, in accordance with his wishes, I went to the sterncastle and there, from this high vantage point, in a loud voice so that all could hear, I sang out:

  Blessed be the light of day

  and the Holy Cross, we say;

  and the Lord of Veritie

  and the Holy Trinity.

  Blessed be the immortal soul

  and the Lord who keeps it whole,

  Blessed be the light of day

  and He who sends the night away.

  The rest of the day was my own, to read, to think, to dream. Until sundown, when I again mounted to the sterncastle and this time sang the beautiful Salve Regina, in the best voice I could summon. Then I took up my gittern and went below, where Don Luis and Cap tain Roa were dining at a table set with white linen and silver.

  Don Luis glanced at the gittern. “You anticipate my wishes.” On the contrary, I had not anticipated his wishes. The gittern was tucked beneath my arm because I could find no other place to put it. Like the rest of my companions, I had a parcel of deck to bed upon, where anything lying around would be stepped upon.

  “Play!” Don Luis commanded me. “Nothing from the seminary. Something pleasant. Peñalosa?”

  “Yes, sir.”

  “A song?”

  “Yes, sir.”

  Don Luis turned to the captain. “Julián has much tal ent. He has taken many lessons.”

  While he went on to describe my musical gifts, I settled myself in a corner of the cabin, finding bare room to pluck the gittern, and began to play. I played throughout the long meal, which consisted of excellent fare—a flagon of red wine, such things as spitted fowl and venison.

  The meal at an end, I was rewarded by a generous helping, which I ate upon the deck, alone in the moonlight, gazing at the dark outlines of the island.

  Trouble, which had begun between the two men in Seville, broke out again while we were making ready to leave Grand Canary. Captain Roa argued that we should follow the same course Columbus had taken on his last voyage, some fourteen years before. On the contrary, Don Luis thought we should follow a more north erly course, based upon a recent chart—one made by Miguel Peña within the last few months—which he had studied at length.

  Since Don Luis owned the Santa Margarita and had provisioned her and hired the crew and Captain Roa himself, it gave him the right, he was convinced, to run the ship. Small matter that he had never been to sea nor knew more than he had read in books and portolans.

  We were scarcely out of the harbor, on the course he had selected, than we ran into a calm that lasted three days and three nights. When the wind did blow again, it barely filled the smallest sails. Another five days of these calm airs went by, with the result that, in two weeks of sailing, we had logged less than eighty Roman miles.

  At this time Captain Roa became worried about the state of our water casks. He spoke his fears at the eve ning meal.

  “By my reckoning,” he said, “we need four weeks of good winds and fair weather until we can hope to make a landfall. Before that time we will run dangerously low on water. It is the mules that consume the water.”

  It was true about the mules. They drank more than all the men aboard.

  “What do you wish to do,” Don Luis said, “—toss them overboard?”

  “No,” the captain answered. “But it would be wise to double back to Grand Canary, refill our casks, and pur chase more. A dozen casks, if possible.”

  “And lose time. Days. A week,” Don Luis said. He looked at me. “Julián, I put you in charge of the casks. See that the crew gets half rations of water. The same for our men. You have good powers of persuasion.”

  Captain Roa shook his head. “It will cause trouble. Not with your men, but with the crew. All are jailbirds. Within an hour they will be at our throats.”

  Jailbirds they were, fresh from Seville’s stone prison, men who had taken advantage of the royal edict that of fered pardons to all who enlisted for a voyage to the New World. Their leader was Baltasar Guzmán. Señor Guzmán had a round head with close-cropped hair. A thin white scar ran from the corner of his mouth to his right ear, which was adorned with a gold ring. He looked as if he had been hacked from a tree trunk. With his iron fists he kept the men in line.

  As I gathered up my supper and went on deck to eat it, my appetite quailed at the prospect of facing the cut throat crew with the news that their rations of water had been reduced by half. But as events turned out, I had no need to face them.

  CHAPTER 3

  THE NEXT MORNING, SHORTLY BEFORE SUNRISE, WE SUDDENLY CAME upon what appeared to be a rocky pinnacle. It lay directly in our path, some quarter of a league off our starboard bow, shrouded in morning mist. But as we drew close upon it, our lookout reported it to be a two-masted, square-rigged carrack drifting slowly eastward under two slack sails.

  Our spirits were greatly lifted at the sight, for it was the first vessel we had seen since leaving Spain. Wild cheers went up from the crew, and at once Captain Roa called through his speaking tube a long hola.

  There was no answer. He hailed the drifting carrack three times, but not a sound came back to us. Nor could we see a soul anywhere upon her battered and salt-encrusted decks or in her rigging. I noted her name, Santa Cecilia, in faded gilt across her sterncastle.

  We were barely a ship’s length from the carrack when Captain Roa said, “There is a look about her that I do not like. There may have been a mutiny aboard. The mutineers can be hiding below deck.”

  As we moved away, Don Luis took charge and or dered the helmsman to circle back and come upon the carrack from our port side, where we had three cannon in position to fire a volley of round shot.

  “I will take a few men and board her when we come around,” Don Luis said. “She seems seaworthy enough.”

  “Her sails are in tatters,” replied Captain Roa. “Her masts are badly sprung. My advice is to stand off and give her a shot or two. She is not worth the risk of an ambush.”

  “That risk I will take,” Don Luis said, drawing his sword. “We may have a prize in our grasp.”

  At the last moment, as we came broadside and were moving away, one of the crew tossed a boarding hook over the Santa Cecilia’s rail. The two ships bumped and then settled side to side. Don Luis leaped aboard, shout ing, “Santiago!” His six musketeers, repeating the cry, followed hard on his heels.

  I could see nothing over the high bulwarks. There was the sound of scurrying boots, of voices, a deep si lence, then Esteban’s name shouted by Don Luis, then my name, and the command “¡Venga! ”

  The first thing that met my eyes as I scrambled over the bulwark and set my feet upon the deck of the Santa Cecilia was the kneeling figure of Don Luis. (The six musketeers had disappeared, apparently down a ladder that led into the hold.) He was kneeling beside an old man, an Indian with sunken cheeks and lips that were bleeding, whose tongue as he opened his mouth to speak was swollen and black.

  I thought first of finding water; then I saw that the cask the Indian leaned against was full and that he had already drunk from it. His voice was coming from a far-off part of his body, a thin croak like that of some fore
st animal. I took his hand in mine. It was like a bundle of dry sticks, only wet with blood that did not have the look of blood but more that of thick, dark syrup.

  Don Luis called Esteban, the slave, to his side and asked him to interpret what the old man was saying. Es teban put his ear close, as the Indian rocked his gaunt head slowly back and forth, and tried to find Spanish words for what he heard from the shriveled lips.

  It appeared that the Santa Cecilia had sailed from an island near Hispaniola in the New World, carrying many slaves and commanded by a Spanish captain. This was some time in the past. It could have been two months ago or six; Esteban was not sure. The slaves mutinied and killed the captain and all the members of his Spanish crew.

  The slaves tried to run the ship but failed. For this reason they wandered over the sea for a long time, swept by contrary winds. Water they had in plenty from frequent rains, but food ran low. They ate the leather chafings on the masts. They ate the dust the rats left. They ate the rats. From what the old slave said, they ate each other. Then some sort of plague struck them, and their limbs turned black and gangrenous. Their gums grew over their teeth.

  I called to one of the crew, and he brought a cup of leftover soup. I held it to the Indian’s lips, but he turned his head away.

  Don Luis stood up and together with Captain Roa went aft to inspect the carrack’s sterncastle. At that mo ment the musketeers climbed out of the hold and stood still at the top of the ladder, their faces white as chalk.

  A sudden breeze started up, and with it, from the bowels of the ship, came a stench that buckled my legs. One of the men pointed below, two quick thrusts of his hand.

  Thinking that someone was in need, I clambered down the ladder into the dimly lit hold. What I saw I cannot describe. If I could describe what I saw, I would refrain rather than to relive it here.

  Suffice it to say that bodies were piled high against the sides of the ship. No one was alive. No one could be alive in that place. The body of a long-haired Indian that I stepped over when I came down the ladder I stepped over again as I left. The soles of the man’s feet had been gnawed away by rats, which were scurrying here and there.

  We moved the old Indian to our ship and tried to get him to eat. He refused everything we offered, continuing to babble about the mutiny, how fortunate it was that he alone of all the crew had been spared. He died shortly before sundown, and as he was dropped over the side, I commended him to God.

  Meanwhile Don Luis, against the objections of Cap tain Roa, decided to lay claim to the Santa Cecilia. The crew spent the afternoon hauling her water casks aboard and securing a rope to the carrack’s bow. There was talk of putting a helmsman aboard her, but it was finally decided to lash the rudder. Near dusk we set off with the slave ship in tow, moving westward in a fresh ening wind.

  At supper, while I was playing a group of gay Andalusian songs, Don Luis said, “We will have the crew clean the ship in the morning, and…”

  “It will take more than a morning,” Captain Roa broke in. “A week.”

  “We have an extra set of sails we can rig up.”

  “They’ll not fit.”

  “We will make them fit,” said Don Luis.

  “What about a crew?” Captain Roa asked. “She will not sail herself.”

  “We take three from Santa Margarita’s crew, three musketeers, and three of my soldiers.”

  Captain Roa gave up the argument, as he had given up others before. With his sheath knife he cut himself a generous slice of mutton, put it in his mouth, and chewed thoughtfully for a while. “What plans for the Santa Cecilia, providing we are fortunate enough to get her into port somewhere? I noted that she is fitted out as a slaver. The hold is penned off. Slaves are as good as gold. And there are thousands among the islands.”

  “An inexhaustible supply, I hear,” said Don Luis.

  I was in the middle of a tune when these last words were said. I stopped playing. It was not the words them selves so much as the way they were spoken that froze my fingers to the strings. I remembered my talk with Don Luis the morning I reminded him that I was a sem inarian, not a priest, and that it should be Father Expoleta who should go. He had cast my suggestion aside, saying that Expoleta was too old and set in his thoughts.

  The suspicion came to me now, as I stood there silently holding the gittern, that his objection to the old priest was not a matter of age nor stubbornness. Expoleta was a leader in the fight against the use of Indian slaves on Spanish farms. He was a part of the same fight that Las Casas was waging in Seville, at court, and in Hispaniola. It was a fight that Don Luis, like all the rich landowners of Spain, bitterly opposed.

  I finished the piece I was playing, while the two men went on about the profits to be made from slaves. I played without pleasure, questioning for the first time Don Luis’s motives in choosing me for his expedition, in stead of Father Expoleta. In a dark mood, I left the cabin and went aft to the caravel’s sternpost.

  The evening was clear with a quarter moon rising. The salt-encrusted carrack wallowed dimly in our wake. The rope that bound us together looked as fragile as a silver thread. By the stroke of a knife the Santa Cecilia and its ghastly cargo could be set adrift. The helmsman, though he had no view of what went on astern, would know by the feel of the rudder that the carrack was free. If for some reason he did not, a member of the watch certainly would.

  And yet it might not be reported. The crew had grumbled when we picked up the carrack, thinking rightly that it would make the voyage longer. And Captain Roa himself had said that she wasn’t worth the trouble. There was a good chance that Don Luis would not know until morning that the Santa Cecilia was drifting far astern, too far away to bother with.

  For two years now in the village of Arroyo, some sixty Indian slaves had been working on our farms, most of them in vineyards and olive groves that be longed to Don Luis. Half were young men and half were women and children. There were no old people among them.

  As soon as the Indians arrived in ox carts from the riverside at Seville, they were unloaded at our village church and baptized into the Christian faith. I was struck, as I watched this baptism, by their gentle ways, even though they must have been sad at leaving their is land homes and bewildered by what they now saw around them.

  Since then, they had become a morose lot; even in church their faces showed no signs of happiness. Some of them had died during the harsh winter just past, and of those who were left, many were unable to do a day’s work, which did not please their owners, all of whom came to believe that the Indians were indolent by na ture. Don Luis was of this belief and said that he pre ferred black slaves from Africa to those from the New World.

  During this time, I became concerned with the preachings of Bartolomé de las Casas, who was born and raised near our village of Arroyo. Las Casas was a violent enemy of slavery. Once he came to our village and spoke out against it, using verses from Ecclesiasticus to shame the landowners who worked their slaves long, hard hours and paid them nothing:

  “The bread of the needy is their life; he that defraudeth him thereof is a man of blood.

  “He that taketh away his neighbour’s living, slayeth him, and he that defraudeth the labourer of his hire is a bloodshedder.”

  His zeal was so inspiring that before he left I swore to him and to myself that I would do all in my power to help the slaves who worked our fields and vineyards.

  And to speak out, whenever the chance came, against slavery itself. But the chance had never come to me in the village of Arroyo.

  A following wind sprang up as I stood there, staring at the rope that bound the two ships together. The Santa Cecilia, because of its broader sterncastle, caught the wind, moved closer to us, and for a moment the rope hung slack.

  I heard bare feet treading softly along the starboard rail before I saw a moving shape and in the moonlight the glint of a knife. The man was unaware that I stood not five paces from him. He grasped the slack rope and, pressing it against a stanchion,
severed it with three hard thrusts of his knife.

  As he turned away, moonlight outlined his face and I saw that it was Esteban, the slave. At the same moment, looking up, his gaze fell full upon me.

  His first impulse was to use the knife, for he raised it and took a step in my direction. I spoke his name. The knife still upraised, he halted.

  “What you have done,” I said to him, speaking slowly so that he would understand me, “I would have done. Go, before you are caught here.”

  Without a word he turned and left me. As I stood there in the shadows, I took a last look at the carrack, fast disappearing in the moonlit sea. Aloud, I repeated the solemn vow I once had taken before Las Casas, and silently I again said it to myself.

  CHAPTER 4

  THE HELMSMAN SOON DISCOVERED THAT THE TOWING ROPE HAD BEEN cut and reported it to the officer of the watch, who for reasons of his own waited until dawn to report to Captain Roa. Pleased at being rid of the carrack, the captain waited until Don Luis came on deck an hour later before informing him of the Santa Cecilia’s loss.

  “Turn about,” Don Luis shouted. “We will go and search her out.”

  “She may have sunk by now,” said the captain, tak ing pains to conceal his pleasure. “If not, she is far astern. No telling at what distance. Nor upon what course she sails.”

  “Turn about,” said Don Luis.

  “I remind you,” Captain Roa replied, “that our water casks are still low. If we lose a day or two hunting the Santa Cecilia we will again be in trouble. Furthermore, it is my belief that should I give your order to the crew, they would not obey it.”

  “Then I shall lop off a head or two. Find the culprit and bring him here.”

  “It was not reported to me until dawn. Which means that officers and crew will protect the man who cut the rope.”

  Don Luis, who was not a fool, strode back and forth for a while, then disappeared into the sterncastle, where he stayed for the rest of the day. But when I appeared at supper with the gittern under my arm, he was in a good mood. After two cups of wine, he even agreed that it was a wise decision Captain Roa had made.