PREVIOUSLY.
[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 month and a half later.
December 15, in the year 1496 of Our Lord (Year 14 of the SuaChie Calendar, Tenth Month)
Somewhere in the south of the Sea of Darkness (Atlantic).
Six weeks had passed since that storm, and the sea, which after the tempest had become a leaden plain without features or promises, seemed to have been gnawing at the men's spirits with the same patience with which salt gnaws at the seams of a hull.
In the cabin, in the yellowish light that came through the small window, Vasco had seen himself reflected that morning in the blade of his dagger: the sharpened cheekbones, the lips cracked until they bled at the corners, the skin of his hands split into fine fissures that stung every time he dipped his pen.
The logs of his charts and those of his personal diary, reviewed the night before, showed without mercy what so long a crossing does to any man: the firm, even hand of the first weeks had unraveled into doubtful strokes, with crossings-out, with sentences that broke off halfway as if the hand had forgotten what it was about to say.
He sighed deeply, and cut the sigh short, as if even that cost him a coin he did not have.
He muttered something about the water, about how little was left and how much it tasted of rotten wood, and went out onto the deck with the slow step of one who saves even his movements.
If he, who ate his ration and drank his with the rigid dignity of command, felt this way, he did not want to imagine what the others endured, above all the ship's boys, those lads of fourteen or fifteen who had come aboard with chests swollen with tales of the Indies and who now dragged themselves among the ropes with sunken eyes, and the smallest pages, who slept wherever sleep overtook them, curled against the barrels like puppies.
Many had weeks of exhaustion behind them, some had spent whole days with fever, and one night, below deck, Vasco had heard two of them raving at the same time, one calling for a mother and the other arguing with someone who was not there, and the tension that sowed among the healthy men had become a thick, almost tangible thing that clung to their clothes.
The deck was nearly deserted at that hour.
A couple of sailors mended sailcloth in the shade of the forecastle with numb fingers, and the helmsman, leaning against the tiller, nodded off with his eyes open, and among them silence had taken the place of jokes and songs, so that one heard only the snap of canvas and the slow rub of water against the hull.
Vasco advanced to the rail and searched with his eyes for the Santa María de la Antigua, that nao which Admiral Columbus, in his glory as the recent discoverer of the kingdom of the Suaza and of the new lands in the west, had rechristened the way one rechristens a child, and he saw her outlined against the horizon with full sails and a high bow, sailing with a steadiness that struck him as almost insolent.
What unsettled him was something more concrete than the envy of a healthy ship.
At the captains' meeting the week before, attended by his father, Paulo, and all the others, the Castilian captain had spoken with a calm confidence so great that Vasco, seated at the back with an empty cup in his hands, had had to look away; and the men of his escort, those who had accompanied him aboard the São Gabriel, looked far better than the best Portuguese sailors, with clean skin, firm steps, an even tone of voice.
He watched them now from afar, tiny on the deck of the nao, and could not understand what sort of sorcery kept them on their feet.
With a crease of confusion between his brows, he retraced his steps and climbed to the sterncastle, where he found João speaking with the ship's chaplain.
The cleric had planted his feet with the rigidity of one preparing for a dispute, and his cassock, spattered with salt stains, hung from shoulders that had grown angular; Vasco caught the end of a reproach about the little enthusiasm with which the crew answered the morning prayers and the evening ones.
"It is the body, Father," João replied with a patience that seemed freshly drawn from a deep well, without raising his voice. "The men are weakened, and when one is like that, one prays with what is left."
"It is the rationing, the excessive rationing," retorted the chaplain, placing a hand on his chest with a gesture meant to be that of a self-sacrificing man. "I myself feel my strength abandoning me."
"We have not yet seen the coast, Father, and the resources are what they are." João looked at him without blinking, his hands clasped behind his back.
The chaplain opened his mouth to insist, but a dry, rasping cough from the step stopped him. He turned and found Vasco leaning against the railing, a fist pressed to his lips, and gave him a brief nod of greeting that Vasco returned with equal curtness.
He asked, in a hoarse voice, for a moment alone with the pilot, and the cleric, recomposing himself the way one smooths a crease, said he would withdraw to pray for the sick on the lower decks.
"I thank you, Father," Vasco answered, in a serious tone that admitted no reply, and waited for the cassock to disappear down the hatch before turning his head toward João.
"You have saved me, sir," murmured the pilot, releasing the breath he seemed to have been holding since the start of the conversation.
"How long has he been at you like this?" asked Vasco, and realized, as he formed the sentence, that the chaplain's protest about resources was nothing other than the lament of his own stomach, dressed in apostolic zeal.
"I lost count since last month." João smiled crookedly, with that smile he used for tasks of little glory. "He always waits until you shut yourself in the cabin with your accounts and your notes, and then he comes to me to complain... He says the rationing is my doing."
Vasco nodded slowly, understanding, and stood a moment looking at the worn planks beneath his boots before asking the question that had been turning in his mind all morning: why the Castilians seemed so confident they could hold out even another month, when his own people looked on the verge of breaking.
João was slow to answer; the wind whipped his cape against his legs.
"It is the ways of the Suaza, sir."
"What ways?"
"What they eat and how they look after their health on the open sea." João must have noticed Vasco's look of incomprehension, because he went on, with a teacher's calm. "We spoke of it at the beginning, do you remember? When we were choosing the provisions, and afterward in the desert city too."
"I remember," Vasco admitted. "But we carried our own rations. What they choose is not what we choose."
João pursed his lips and looked out to sea, with the expression of one trying to explain something that even he finds hard to believe.
"They think the body needs certain things to function, sir, besides filling the belly... Take salt. A man who does not taste it, or a beast, begins to suffer cramps in the muscles, pains that twist the legs, and sometimes he ends badly, very badly. Well, they believe the same happens with other foods."
Vasco nodded once more, though he still did not see the connection.
"And what have the pickles to do with that, those casks of wood charred on the inside that the Castilians carry?"
"They say those preparations stop the sea sickness and other ailments." João shrugged, and the cape slid a hand-span down his arm. "They have proven it, or so they claim."
Vasco's gaze clouded, as it tended to with almost everyone hearing these explanations for the first time, and he asked, without hiding his distrust, whether the pilot truly believed it.
"In all my years at sea, sir, I have seen crewmen die on ships of every kind, good and bad, under saintly captains and under rascally ones." João spoke without emphasis, looking at some indeterminate point beyond the rail, and the dryness of his voice carried the weight of experience. "If a small change can save a life, even one, it is worth the effort of trying."
Vasco parted his lips to answer, not yet knowing what he would say, but before the first word left his mouth, a cry pierced the deck from the top of the mainmast, a sharp cry, torn with anxiety, which was not that of the morning's lookout but another's, a younger one, who translated in a breathless voice the signals of the Bérrio: land ahead.
The next day.
The previous afternoon they had approached the coast with sails half furled and the men crowded at the bulwarks, watching in silence that low, brown line rising from the water like a promise none dared to utter.
They had anchored at a prudent distance, the sounding lead touching sandy bottom, and during the night the pilots of each ship had measured the heights of the stars with the astrolabe braced against their chests, correcting figures by lantern light, arguing in low voices from stern to stern by signals and boats, until at dawn the captains agreed on what everyone already sensed: they were near the Cape of Good Hope.
Before entering the turbulent waters that Bartolomeu Dias had described in his accounts, with that mixture of pride and dread that trembled in his voice, they had to resupply without excuse or delay.
Vasco climbed aboard his father's carrack with the morning still fresh, hauling himself up by the ladder rope while the boat pitched beneath his feet, and on stepping onto the deck of the São Gabriel he breathed a smell he knew all too well, that thick air of confined bodies, damp wood, and sickness that seeps into every corner.
The situation on that ship resembled that of his own: sailors with ashen faces who straightened as he passed with a visible effort, and in a corner a couple of ship's boys dozing, seated against a coiled rope.
The other captains were arriving one after another, and among them the Castilian, who came up with his usual firm step, his beard trimmed, his skin still fair, though Vasco now noted in the shadows under his eyes and the tension of his neck the signs of a weariness that had not shown before.
But what tightened his chest was the cabin door.
An aide opened it from within, and out of the gloom came his father leaning on the young man's arm, with a slowness Vasco had not seen in him even on the worst days in Lisbon, dragging his feet over the planking as if each step had to be negotiated with his knees.
They led him to a padded chair that someone had set out beforehand beside the mainmast, and there they let him sink down carefully, while the old captain settled his cape over shoulders that seemed to have shrunk.
Vasco sought out Paulo with his eyes, who stood on the other side of the circle of captains, and found in his brother's face the same mute question, the same worry held back out of respect, and both looked away at the same moment, like men caught staring at something they should not.
The voice of Estêvão, however, had not lost a particle of its hardness.
He ordered, without preamble, that an advance party go ashore to reconnoiter the terrain, while the rest of the crews busied themselves preparing barrels to replenish the water, and his knotted hand struck the arm of the chair with the resolve of one dealing the final cut to an argument.
The Castilian captain, who had remained standing with arms crossed, took the floor:
"And what shall we do about the locals?" he asked, tilting his head slightly toward the coast. "Some of my men saw them yesterday at dusk, and others this very morning, prowling among the dunes."
"We will trade with them," replied the old man, and coughed once, briefly, covering his mouth with the back of his hand. "Take glass beads, small knives, metal trinkets, whatever has already proven to interest tribes such as those one can make out from here... But carefully, very carefully."
"I hope not to have to fight them," said the Castilian, in a tone meant to be conciliatory and yet with an edge in it. "But I will go prepared."
The other captains nodded, and Vasco with them, though he did so with a reluctance he struggled to hide.
Had the expedition been under his command, he would have limited the arms, leaving swords and arquebuses in the boats so as to show no hostility to people who perhaps only peered out of curiosity; but they were not speaking of his command, and his tongue stayed still between his teeth.
Two hours later.
Vasco walked among the men of the advance party along a strip of dark sand and dry scrub, and the first thing he noticed was that those sailors, who for weeks had dragged their feet like shadows, seemed suddenly renewed, with straighter backs and livelier eyes, and that their shirts were soaked, though not with sweat: it smelled of wet earth, of something fresh and mineral, and Vasco understood they had found water.
Indeed, the officer in charge showed him, a few hundred paces off, a series of wells dug into the moist ground, ringed with stones, from which welled a clear liquid that the men poured over their heads, their necks, their hands, with an almost childlike joy.
They had also noticed the presence of the locals, who from the crest of a dune watched them with a mixture of curiosity and caution, slender, still figures cut out against the sky.
Vasco felt confident.
With the resources they carried, he reasoned as he gave instructions to a couple of messengers to inform the crews of the wells' existence, it would be enough to manage to understand those people in order to obtain what was needed and continue the voyage.
The Castilian captain, who had volunteered, did not share that serenity: he had his men arranged in a discreet line, hands near the hilts, though he also carried sample goods for a possible barter, and his gaze swept the horizon with the tension of a dog that smells something on the wind.
They advanced toward the place from which they were being watched, at a slow pace, palms visible and shoulders relaxed, and the wind, which at times blew in dry gusts, lifted the sand against their calves.
There was a tension in the air that could be touched, and the sounds that reached them from the dunes did not relieve it: they were dry clicks, produced by the tongues of those men, rapid clicks and marked intonations that Vasco found so foreign that, for a moment, he had trouble believing they were words.
He could not imagine how he would make himself understood by those who spoke this way, and that doubt tightened his throat a little.
After a few more steps, a man separated from the group and approached them, somewhat shorter than any of the Europeans, with weathered skin and a wiry body, holding a wooden spear without menace but without humility, and he looked them in the face, unafraid.
He began to speak with those clicks, in an insistent cadence, and as he did so he pointed at them, then at the sea, then at his people, repeating the sequence with an eagerness to explain that filled Vasco with pity and fascination at once.
The Castilian captain and the sailors exchanged looks of perplexity; no one knew what to say. When Vasco noticed that the man's brows were beginning to knit, he ordered his messenger to hand over samples of the goods.
The lad took out the bundle calmly, untied it with careful fingers, and approached the man, while in the distance the man's companions tensed, and the European sailors, in turn, held their breath.
Vasco watched the man's face with deep attention as he saw the objects, and at first he saw doubt, a gesture of wariness that tightened his jaw, but then his fingers took up a glass bead and raised it to the light, turned it, and the gleam of the piece kindled something in his eyes; then he took a metal trinket, felt it with the pad of his thumb, and his expression filled with curiosity and a barely concealed longing.
Vasco seized that instant to step a pace closer and point toward the sheep grazing beyond, a breed he had never seen in any port, with coarse wool and a thick tail, and then he pointed at the objects and again at the sheep, with broad, patient gestures, until the man seemed to understand and nodded.
Vasco sighed with relief, though the Castilian captain beside him did not seem as convinced, his hand still on the pommel of his sword and his lips pressed into a hard line.
A few hours later.
Vasco kept watching the exchange, standing on a low dune from which he commanded the beach, while the local men brought, one after another, a couple of sheep, some tanned hides, strips of dried meat, and baskets of wild fruits that no Portuguese had ever tasted.
Things seemed to be going normally, the sun had risen and was now sinking toward afternoon in an amber light, and the sailors laughed with their mouths full of a sour fruit that made them wrinkle their faces.
Yet each time more men joined the group, those whom Vasco, privately, had begun to call Hottentots for the sound of their voices began to argue among themselves with their clicks and intonations, and their faces showed a concern that had not been in them hours before.
Just as the sailors received the first sheep and began to lead them with ropes toward the beach, convinced they had closed a good bargain, a group of natives moved in unison.
Vasco saw it all with an unreal slowness: the arms rising, the spears leveled, the bodies leaning back to gather momentum, and he understood with a hollowness in his stomach that the unease that had haunted him since morning had just been made flesh.
But the confidence he had sown in his own chest delayed his reaction, so that he stood motionless, mouth half open, as the spears cut through the air in a long, dark arc, and by fortune none was aimed at him.
He managed to see, however, how they fell upon his men, who advanced backward, trusting, dragging the precious sheep across the sand, and how blood gushed from the bodies in short, bright spurts, and how one of the spears sank halfway into the belly of a young sailor, who looked down with an expression of pure disbelief while terror froze Vasco to the bone.
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[A/N: CHAPTER COMPLETED
You won't believe this—I just landed a job, totally out of the blue.
Literally, I was having lunch with someone, and they told me, "I've got a job for you, but we have to leave today" (to a place quite a ways away).
So, I grabbed whatever clothes I could, along with my computer, and off I went.
It'll be for at least a month. I'll try to keep posting every now and then, but I can't make any promises—at least this time I'm giving you a heads-up!]