1492 Part 9

But Juan Lepe was taken from the forecastle, and slept where Nunez had slept, and had his place at the table in the great cabin. He turned from the sailor Juan Lepe to the physician Juan Lepe, becoming "Doctor" and "Senor." The wheel turns and a man's past makes his present.

A few days from Gomera, an hour after sunset, the night was torn by the hugest, flaming, falling star that any of us had ever seen. The ma.s.s drove down the lower skirt of the sky, leaving behind it a wake of fire.

It plunged into the sea. There is no sailor but knows shooting stars.

But this was a hugely great one, and Ocean-Sea very lonely, and to most there our errand a spectral and frightening one. It needed both the Admiral and Fray Ignatio to quell the panic.

The next day a great bird like a crane pa.s.sed over the _Santa Maria_. It came from Africa, behind us. But it spoke of land, and the sailors gazed wistfully.

This day I entered the great cabin when none was there but the Admiral, and again he sat at table with his charts and his books. He asked of the sick and I answered. Again he sat looking through open door and window at blue water, a great figure of a man with a great head and face and early-silvered hair. "Do you know aught," he asked, "of astrology?"

I answered that I knew a little of the surface of it.

"I have a sense," he said, "that our stars are akin, yours and mine. I felt it the day Granada fell, and I felt it on Cordova road, and again that day below La Rabida when we turned the corner and the bells rang and you stood beside the vineyard wall. Should I not have learned in more than fifty years to know a man? The stars are akin that will endure for vision's sake."

I said, "I believe that, my Admiral."

He sat in silence for a moment, then drew the log between us and turned several pages so that I might see the reckoning. "We have come well," I said. "Yet with so fair a wind, I should have thought--"

He turned the leaves till he rested at one covered with other figures.

"Here it is as it truly is, and where we truly are! We have oversailed all that the first show, and so many leagues besides."

"Two records, true and untrue! Why do you do it so?"

"I have told them that after seven hundred leagues we should find land.

Add fifty more for our general imperfection. But it may be wider than I think. We may not come even to some fringing island in eight hundred leagues, no, nor in more than that! If it be a thousand, if it be two thousand, on I go! But after the seven hundred is pa.s.sed, it will be hard to keep them in hand. So, though we are covering more, I let them think we are covering only this."

I could but laugh. Two reckonings! After all, he was not Italian for nothing!

"The master knows," he said, "and also Diego de Arana. But at least one other should know. Two might drown or perish from sickness. I myself might fall sick and die, though I will not believe it!" He paused a moment, then said, looking directly at me, "I need one in whom I can utterly confide. I should have had with me my brother Bartholomew. But he is in England. A man going to seek a Crown jewel for all men should have with him son or brother. Diego de Arana is a kinsman of one whom I love, and he partly believes. But Roderigo Sanchez and the others believe hardly at all. There is Fray Ignatio. He believes, and I confess my sins to him. But he thinks only of penitents, and this matter needs mind, not heart alone. Because of that sense of the stars, I tell you these things."

The next day it came to me that in that Journal which he meant to make like Caesar's Commentaries, he might put down the change in the _Santa Maria's_ physicians and set my name there too often. I watched my chance and finding it, asked that he name me not in that book. His gray eyes rested upon me; he demanded the reason for that. I said that in Spain I was in danger, and that Juan Lepe was not my name. More than that I did not wish to say, and perchance it were wiser for him not to know. But I would not that the powerful should mark me in his Journal or elsewhere!

Usually his eyes were wide and filled with light as though it were sent into them from the vast lands that he continuously saw. But he could be immediate captain and commander of things and of men, and when that was so, the light drew into a point, and he became eagle that sees through the wave the fish. Had he been the seer alone, truly he might have been the seer of what was to be discovered and might have set others upon the path. But he would not have sailed on the _Santa Maria_!

In his many years at sea he must many times have met men who had put to sea out of fear of land. He would have sailed with many whose names, he knew, were not those given them at birth. He must have learned to take reasons for granted and to go on--where he wished to go on. So we gazed at each other.

"I had written down," he said, "that you greatly helped the sick, and upon Bernardo Nunez's going to the _Nina_, became our physician. But I will write no more of you, and that written will pa.s.s in the flood of things to come." After a moment, he ended with deliberation, "I know my star to be a great star, burning long and now with a mounting flame. If yours is in any wise its kin, then there needs must be histories."

CHAPTER XII

IT was a strange thing how utterly favoring now was the wind! It blew with a great steady push always from the east, and always we ran before it into the west. Day after day we experienced this warm and steadfast driving; day after day we never s.h.i.+fted sail. The rigging sang a steady song, day and night. The crowned woman, our figurehead, ran, light-footed, over a green and blue plain, and where the plain ended no man might know! "Perhaps it does not end!" said the mariners.

Of the hidalgos aboard I like best Diego de Arana who had cast off his melancholy. He was a man of sense, candid and brave. Roderigo Sanchez sat and moved a dull, good man. Roderigo de Escobedo had courage, but he was factious, would take sides against his shadow if none other were there. Pedro Gutierrez had been a courtier, and had the vices of that life, together with a daredevil recklessness and a kind of wild wit.

I had liking and admiration for Fray Ignatio, but careful indeed was I when I spoke with him!

The wind blew unchanging, the stark blue s.h.i.+eld of sea, a water-world, must be taken in the whole, for there was no contrasting point in it to catch the eye. Sancho, forward, in a high sweet voice like a jongleur's voice, was singing to the men an endless ballad. Upon the p.o.o.p deck Escobedo and Gutierrez, having diced themselves to an even wealth or poverty, turned to further examination of the Admiral's ways. Endlessly they made him and his views subject of talk. Roderigo Sanchez listened with a face like an owl, Diego de Arana with some irony about his lips.

I came and stood beside the latter.

They were upon the beggary of Christopherus Columbus. "How did the Prior of La Rabida--?"

"I'll tell you, for I heard it. One evening at vesper bell comes our Admiral--no less a man!--to Priory gate with a young boy in his hand.

Not Fernando his love-child, but Diego the elder, who was born in Lisbon. All dusty with the road, like any beggar you see, and not much better clad, foot-sore and begging bread for himself and the boy. And because of his white hair, and because he carried himself in that absurd way that makes the undiscerning cry, 'Ah, my lord king in disguise!'

the porter must have him in, and by and by comes the prior and stands to talk with him, 'From where?' 'From Cordova.' 'Whither?' 'To Portugal.'

'For why?' 'To speak again with King John!' 'Are you in the habit of speaking with kings?' 'Aye, I am!' 'About what, may I ask?' 'About the finding of India by way of Ocean-Sea, the possession of idolatrous countries and the great wealth thereof, and the taking of Christ to the heathen who else are lost!'"

"Ha, ha! Ha, ha!" This was Escobedo.

"The prior thinks, 'This is an interesting madman.' And being a charitable good man and lacking entertainment that evening, he brings the beggar in to supper and sits by him."

Roderigo Sanchez opened his mouth. "All Andalusia knows Fray Juan Perez is a kind of visionary!"

"Aye, like to like! 'Have you been to our Queen and the King?' 'Aye, I have!' saith the beggar, 'but they are warring with the Moors and will pull Granada down and do not see the greater glory!'"

All laughed at that, and indeed Gutierrez could mimic to perfection. We got, full measure, the beggar's loftiness.

"So the siren sings and the prior leaps to meet her, or tarantula stings him and he dances! 'I am growing mad too,' thinks Fray Juan Perez, and begins presently to tell that last week he dreamed of Prester John. The end is that he and the beggar talk till midnight and the next morning they talk again, and the prior sends for his friends Captain Martin Alonzo Pinzon and the physician Garcia Fernandez. The beggar gains them all!"

"Do you think a beggar can do that?" I said. "Only a giver can do that."

Pedro Gutierrez turned black eyes upon Juan Lepe, whom he resented there on the p.o.o.p deck. "How could you have learned so much, Doctor, while you were making sail and was.h.i.+ng s.h.i.+p?" He was my younger in every way, and I answered equably, "I learned in the same way that the Admiral learned while he begged."

"Touched!" said Diego de Arana. "So that is the way the prior came into the business?"

"He enters with such vigor," said Gutierrez, "that what does he do but write an impa.s.sioned letter to the Queen, having long ago, for a time, been her confessor? What he tells her, G.o.d knows, but it seems that it changes the world! She answers that for herself she hath grieved for Master Columbus's departure from the court and the realm, and that if he will turn and come to Santa Fe, his propositions shall at last be thoroughly weighed. Letter finds the beggar with his boy honored guest of La Rabida, touching heads with Martin Pinzon over maps and charts and the 'Book of Travels' of Messer Marco Polo. There is great joy! The beggar hath the prior's own mule and his son a jennet, and here we go to Santa Fe! That was last year. Now the boy that whimpered for bread at convent gate is Don Diego Colon, page to Prince Juan, and the Viceroy sails on the _Santa Maria_ for the countries he will administer!"

Gutierrez shook the dice in the box. "Oh, Queen Luck, that I have served for so long! Why do you not make me viceroy?"

Said Escobedo, "Viceroy of the continent of water and Admiral of seaweed and fishes!"

Diego de Arana took that up. "We are obliged to find something! No sensible man can think like some of those forward that this goes on forever and we shall sail till the wood rots and sails grow ragged and wind carries away their shreds or they fall into dust!"

"Who knows anything of River-Ocean? We may not find the western sh.o.r.e, if there be such a thing, for a year! By that time storm will sink us ten times over, or plague will take us--"

"There's not needed plague nor storm. Just say, food won't last, and water is already half gone!"

"That's the undeniable truth," quoth Roderigo Sanchez, and looked with a perturbed face at the too-smooth sea.

Smooth blue sea continued, wind continued, pus.h.i.+ng like a great, warm hand, east to west. The Admiral spent hours alone in his sleeping cabin.

There were men who said that he studied there a great book of magic. He had often a book in his hand, it is true, but Juan Lepe the physician knew what he strove to keep from others, that the gout that at times threatened crippling was upon him and was easier to bear lying down.

Sunset, vesper prayer and _Salve Regina_. As the strains died, there became evident a lingering on the part of the seamen. The master spoke to the Admiral. "They've found out about the needle, sir! Perhaps you'd better hear them and answer them."

Almost every day he heard them and answered them. To make his seamen, however they groaned and grumbled and plotted, yet abide him and his purpose was a day-after-day arising task! "Now," he said equably, in the tone almost of a father, "What is it to-day, men?"

The throng worked and put forward a spokesman, who looked from the Admiral to the clear north. "It is the star, sir! The needle no longer points to it! We thought you might explain to us unlearned--What we think is that distance is going to widen and widen! What's to keep needle from swinging right south? Then will we never get home to Palos and our wives and children--never and never and never!"

Said the Admiral, "It will not change further, or if it does a very little further!" In his most decisive, most convincing voice he explained why the needle no longer pointed precisely to the star. The deviation marked and allowed for, it was near enough for practical purposes, and the reasons for the wandering--