Year 14 of the SuaChie Calendar, Seventh Month (September 1496).
Port of Santa Maria de Belém, Lisbon, Kingdom of Portugal.
The port of Santa Maria de Belém smelled of hot pitch, salted fish, and the cheap spices the peddlers stirred in their baskets. Beneath that mingled smell throbbed the murmur of a crowd that had been pressed against the quays since dawn, waving handkerchiefs and shouting the names of sons, husbands, and brothers.
Never had so many stalls been seen along the water; every merchant in the quarter had dragged his stand as far as the guard allowed, and sometimes a little farther, so that the aroma of fried pastries and watered wine reached the deck of the São Rafael wrapped in the warm September sun.
King Manuel had proclaimed from the pulpit, and then by decree in every square, that those six sails would at last break the gag with which Islam was strangling the trade of the East. The people, who understood little of routes but a great deal about expensive pepper, had decided to believe him.
Vasco paced the waist of the ship with his hands behind his back, touching a line here, a gunwale notebook there, with the meticulousness of one who knows that the sea punishes what the eye forgives.
Beside him walked João de Coimbra, his chief pilot, a lean man with a sunburned nape and a rolling gait, who had crossed the line of the sky more times than any of the young sailors now climbing the rigging amid nervous laughter.
The ship's boys scrubbed the wet wood with sandstone, the carpenters drove one last wedge into the forward hatch, and the smell of freshly tarred rope mingled with the sweat of the men hauling the last barrels.
"The rigging?" Vasco asked without slowing his pace, staring at the mainmast as if he could discover a crack in it merely by wishing.
"Checked twice by me and once by the boatswain, sir. Nothing to correct." João waited a heartbeat, and the silence that followed had the texture of something left unsaid not for lack of words but from an excess of prudence. Vasco's jaw was tense and his gaze turned toward the bay, so the pilot lowered his voice to an almost familiar tone. "Is it your father's health, if I may ask?"
Vasco did not answer at once.
Across the water, only a few fathoms away, the São Gabriel rocked her twin hull with the same gravity as her captain, and on the sterncastle a slender figure, wrapped in a cloak too heavy for that morning, stood with a stiffness that Vasco found painful to recognize. He sighed slowly, letting the air leave through his nose as if it might carry off some of the weight.
"It worries me, yes," he admitted. "Though I know well that only death would keep him from this voyage, and not even death, I fear, without his arguing with it first."
João let out a short, rough laugh that never quite became mockery.
He had sailed with Estêvão in harder years, when both were younger and the air of Africa scorched their throats, and he knew the stubborn gleam that now showed in the old captain's eyes.
"I understand you, sir," he said. "There is no better life than that of a man of the sea, and whoever has tasted it does not give it up on any physician's advice."
Vasco nodded, though the gesture came slower than he intended.
What truly weighed on him, he realized as his gaze came to rest, was not on his father's ship but a little farther off, where the two Castilian sails stood out among the Portuguese ones with their lower hulls and foreign pennants, strange as two guests nobody had wanted to seat at the table.
It was not for him to dispute the decisions of the crown, much less those his king made with the Iberian brother kingdoms; but he had seen his father's mouth when the herald read out the terms, that thin line that formed when he swallowed something that did not sit well, and that gesture, added to the tremors that lately shook his hands, had settled in Vasco an unnamed unease.
"Your father agreed to respect the chain of command," João observed, noticing that the silence was stretching. "He said so before the king. He is the one who leads the expedition, and they know it."
"I hope so," Vasco murmured.
On the sterncastle of the São Gabriel a small flag rose, barely a dark rag against the sky, and Vasco followed it with his eyes until it hung fixed. He straightened, feeling the leather of his gloves damp with sweat.
"João, go to the scribe. Have him record the date as the eighth of September in the year of Our Lord fourteen hundred and ninety-six, and have him write it in a clear hand; I do not want anyone doubting tomorrow when we departed." He turned his eyes toward the open estuary, where the water turned a steely gray and the horizon seemed a promise or a threat, depending on how one looked. "It is time to set sail."
Almost three weeks later.
The six ships, four Portuguese and two Spanish, descended southward with the warm trade winds pushing at their sterns, and the routine of the voyage had wrapped the hull of the São Rafael in the deceptive comfort of things that have not yet begun to go wrong.
They had left the Canaries behind days before, a faint line of violet mountains that the men pointed out with some relief, and according to João's reckonings, so often rechecked with the compass and the table of the sun's altitudes, the city of the Suaza must now be very near.
Vasco watched from the sterncastle as the sailors climbed the shrouds to furl the lesser sails, their bare feet gripping the waxed ropes, while below the ship's boys formed a line beside the hatch and passed buckets hand to hand to bail the water the ship's belly sweated.
The heat had begun to make itself felt obliquely, not in the air itself but in the shine on foreheads and the shirts stuck to backs, in the way the tar in the seams gave off a smell denser and sweeter than that of Lisbon. Someone in the bow hummed a muleteers' tune; someone else spat overboard listlessly.
The lookout's cry pulled him from his reverie.
From the top of the mast the man waved his arm, and across the formation, the Bérrio, the light caravel commanded by his brother Paulo, raised the series of signals they had agreed upon before departure: proximity of the city, change of course toward the coast.
João, who had come to the rail with the astrolabe hanging from his belt, followed the little pennants with his eyes and remarked with a half smile:
"It was a good idea to keep the caravel, sir. Agile as a gull, and with the same haste."
Vasco nodded and felt, for the first time on the whole voyage, something like contentment; a brief spark, quickly smothered by the sense that good things rarely came without customs duties.
He raised his voice to order the sails trimmed, the topmen to let out the mainsail and take in the royal, and with a gesture of his hand he signaled João to correct the helm, one quarter to starboard, without abruptness, so that the hull would settle into the wind's new angle without rolling.
Four hours later.
The sun was already falling in a bronze light over the waters of the harbor, and Vasco stood beside the cargo hatch with his arms crossed, detained by three inspection officers who moved with the solemn slowness of physicians at a deathbed.
He knew of the Suaza's exaggerations in matters of inspection; he had heard it a thousand times in the taverns along the Tagus and from his own father's mouth, who cursed those people with an almost admiring fervor.
But until then it had always been someone else who endured the procedure: he waited at anchor at a prudent distance, with the ship still and the men idle, while Estêvão disembarked grudgingly and returned hours later, grumbling about seals, tablets, and bloodlettings of questions.
Now, by contrast, it was the old man himself who had ordered, fed up with that bureaucracy of the sea, that the São Rafael and the Bérrio dock at the quay, to replenish water, to buy provisions, and perhaps, with a little well-placed gold, to obtain some information worth more than the provisions.
Vasco followed each movement of the inspectors with wary eyes.
One of them descended through the hatch with a lantern of clean glass, the kind that did not smoke, while another wrote on a tablet with a pen that never seemed to stain; the third ran his fingertips over the barrels on the deck, smelled them, rapped them gently with his knuckles.
There was no haggling to be heard, no open hand in sight, no crooked gesture to hint that certain merchandise might be "confiscated for security reasons," as in so many ports of Barbary or Flanders where inspection was nothing but an elegant form of theft.
Here no one so much as glanced at the bales of fine cloth or the sealed chests of silver; their eyes were looking for something else, and that realization unsettled Vasco more than the usual rapacity.
"At least," he muttered, more to himself than to anyone, "there will be no tolls."
At that instant, in the dark depths of the hold, between two sacks of flour, something moved.
It was barely a brush, a brown flash and a click of claws on wood, but the inspector with the lantern raised his head like a hunting dog, and the glow of his light crept slowly across the floor until it stopped on a thin tail disappearing behind a barrel.
Vasco felt the blood drain from his face. The man looked at him, he looked back, and in the silence that stretched between them, as thick as the warm air of the hold, both knew exactly what was about to happen.
The next day.
The knock at the door came before the light.
Vasco opened his eyes on a pillow that smelled of dried lavender and freshly washed linen, not knowing for an instant where he was, until the voice of the sailor on the other side of the wood, speaking low and fast, gave him back the port, the inspectors, and the click of that brown tail among the sacks.
The purchased cargoes were already ready, the man kept saying, and only the meeting with Chancellor Soca remained before sailing.
Vasco answered with a grunt that was enough to dismiss him, sat up with a grimace of stiffness in his shoulders, and groped for his shirt on the back of the chair, while the gray clarity of the early morning filtered through the shutters and brought with it the noise of carts, of ropes tightening, and of some disoriented rooster.
As he fastened his doublet before a mirror of polished metal so clear that it returned his dark circles without mercy, the previous afternoon passed through his head again with the slowness of bad digestion.
He had spent hours beside the hatch swearing that his goods had not been touched by rodents, that that rat was a lone stowaway and not the herald of a plague, and the officers had listened with an impenetrable courtesy, writing on their tablets without ever changing expression.
Paulo, his brother, had tried to soften them with a couple of discreet gifts, a purse of coins and a silver chain, and the reply was a warning delivered with glacial calm: that constituted a crime, and the next time, even though they were subjects of an allied kingdom, they would end up locked away.
Vasco remembered Paulo's silence, his ears burning, pocketing the chain like one pocketing a slap.
Then came the rest: the supplies unloaded by torchlight, the shuttling of water barrels that smelled of new wood, the accounts repeated until the letters blurred, and only in the small hours, with aching shoulders, had he managed to be led to a bed.
The only thing that had consoled him, he thought as he fastened the last button, had been the intervention of Chancellor Soca, who, upon learning of the Portuguese presence and the trouble his men had caused in the port, sent word offering him a room at the Home of Za.
Vasco did not know who this Za was, nor whether it was a local saint, an innkeeper, or a surname, but the place was comfortable to the point of discomfort, with sheets that did not itch, a cool stone courtyard where they served him a stew of fish and legumes seasoned surprisingly to his taste, and a cleanliness so complete that even the floor seemed washed by devout hands.
Half an hour later.
He was in the port office, a low building of pale stone with wide windows that let in the smell of salt and pitch, seated before a polished wooden table where a single inkwell and a stack of papers ordered to the millimeter separated him from Chancellor Soca.
There was no interpreter in the room, nor scribe, nor guards in sight; only the two of them, and Vasco, feeling his neck stiff inside his shirt collar, wondered how the devil one began a conversation with a man whose language he knew nothing of.
Soca solved the problem before he finished forming the doubt. He rose to his feet, inclined his head slightly and, in clean Portuguese, somewhat slow, with a faint accent that dragged the vowels, bade him good morning and apologized for the previous day's inconvenience.
Vasco blinked. He felt surprise rise in his throat, and managed to recompose his face into a grimace of courtesy that cost him more effort than he would have liked.
"It was no trouble, Chancellor," he said, and his tense smile contradicted every syllable. "It simply strikes me as... singular, how strict you are in your ports."
"Necessary measures," Soca replied, without taking his eyes from his and without the slightest trace of apology in his voice. "Above all for health." He paused, and his fingers, long and calloused, came to rest on the edge of the table with the stillness of one accustomed to his words being obeyed. "And seeing how far you seem to be going; you would do well to adopt some of our customs. It costs little. It costs less than burying men."
Vasco did not know what to answer.
He nodded, gave thanks with an empty correctness, and left the office with the uncomfortable certainty that the man had not made him a suggestion, but a warning with good manners.
A month later.
The six ships of the expedition plowed a wide, dark sea, far from any coast, tracing over the waters what the Portuguese had christened the volta do mar.
It was they, the Portuguese, who had discovered that turn after years of probing south along the Guinea region, until they understood that the coast would not allow itself to be followed by any sensible prow and that the only way out was to push into the open sea toward the southwest, until catching the strongest currents that would then drive the ships east and back toward land.
Vasco, bent over João's nautical charts spread out in his cabin beneath the smoke of the lamp, thought of Bartolomeu Dias, who years earlier had first repeated that route in the Sea of Darkness (Atlantic) of the south, and felt, as he ran his fingers over the strokes of ink, the presence of all those who had been lost in those waters before him. They followed that man's tracks, and knew better than anyone how capricious the path was.
He rose from the desk with a sigh, pushed aside the curtain, and climbed to the sterncastle, where the salt wind struck his face with a smell of damp and swollen wood.
João was there, leaning on the rail, his gaze fixed on the west and his cape flapping against his legs. Vasco approached, propped his elbows beside him, and asked what he was watching so intently.
"There lies the kingdom of the Suaza, sir," João said without turning his head. "Or so the maps say. But I have asked around, among those who have been there, and they tell me that land is far greater than a single kingdom. That it stretches and stretches, and no one knows where it ends."
There was in his voice a tone Vasco knew all too well, a nostalgia for things unseen, a thirst for the horizon that he himself had felt at fifteen and that he now preferred not to awaken.
He changed the subject deliberately, and asked whether the bearings were still correct.
"I noted everything down during the small hours, sir. We are on a route similar to Bartolomeu's." João scratched the back of his neck, and at last looked away from the west. "Though how far inland we go is a matter for your father."
"Then all is well," Vasco concluded, and ran his eyes over the deck, where several sailors had begun to stand motionless beside the ropes, their gazes lost on the waterline, searching the void for something to call hope. "At least the heading is right."
"They are used to it, sir," João said with a half smile, following his gaze. "The worst thing that could happen to us now would be a storm."
As if the words had weight of their own, the lookout's cry fell from the top of the mainmast, and the man, with his arm stretched toward the Bérrio, began to translate aloud the caravel's signals: a storm was approaching, possibly a strong one.
The shouts of the boatswains were quick to answer, curt orders crossing all over the deck, and Vasco, pressing his lips together, turned slowly toward João with a look heavy with reproach. The pilot, without the slightest trace of guilt, shrugged.
A few hours later.
What should have been a warm afternoon had become a premature night, a black ceiling of clouds beneath which the rain fell from all sides at once, sideways, from above, from the very spray leaping over the rail, drenching the wood, the faces, and the thoughts.
The wind howled through the rigging with an almost personal fury, tearing men from the deck, lifting them for an instant a few hand-spans before slamming them back against the planks, amid curses and half-uttered prayers.
The shouts mingled with the creaking of the hull and the roar of the waves, and with each blow of the sea the São Rafael shuddered from bow to stern like a wounded animal.
Vasco had decided to face the tempest alongside his men, and he stood tied by a rope to the base of the mizzenmast, his hands clutching the cord and his eyes narrowed against the salt water burning his eyelids.
He searched the darkness for the hulls of the other ships, and the lightning flashes, scarce and brief, granted him only scattered glimpses: the silhouette of a distant hull, hundreds of fathoms away, raised on a dark crest taller than the mainmast, and then nothing again, the black hollow of the sea swallowing the image.
Each flash also revealed to him the height of the waves and the force with which they broke, and that momentary clarity chilled him more than the rain. He felt the trembling run through his hands, his knees, his jaw, a trembling that no longer had anything to do with the cold.
"May God be with us," he murmured, and the wind carried the words off before they reached any ear.
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[A/N: CHAPTER COMPLETED
Now I think the other novel should appear, since with chapter 2 I've reached the required word count.]