Chapter 1 Columbus by Rafael Sabatini
THE WAYFARER
A man and a boy climbed the slope from the estuary of the Tinto by a sandy path that wound through a straggling growth of pine-trees. It was the eventide of a winter’s day at about the time that the Spanish Sovereigns were moving to the investment of Granada, which informs you that these events fell out in the closing decade of the fifteenth century.
From the long line of dunes below them, the Arenas Gordas, stretching away for miles towards Cadiz, the sand was tossed and whirled like spindrift by a bitter wind that blew from the south-west. Beyond, the storm-lashed Atlantic was grey under grey skies.
The man was well above the common height, broad-shouldered and long-limbed, fashioned in lines of great athletic vigour. From under a plain round hat his hair, red, thick and glossy, hung to the nape of his neck. Grey eyes shone clear in a weathered face whose patrician mould and stamp of pride were at odds with the shabbiness of his wear. A surcoat of homespun, once black but faded now to a mournful greenish hue, clothed him to the knees, and was caught about his middle by a belt of plain leather. From this a dagger hung on his right hip and a leather scrip on his left thigh. His hose was of coarse black wool; he was roughly shod, and he carried his meagre gear bundled in a cloak and slung from his shoulder by a staff of quince-wood. His age was little beyond the middle thirties.
The boy, a sturdy child of seven or eight, clinging to his right hand, looked up to ask: “Is it much farther?”
He spoke in Portuguese, and was answered by his sire in the same tongue, on a note that was half-bitter, half-whimsical.
“Now, God avail me, child, that is a question I’ve been asking myself these ten years, and never found the answer yet.” Then, abruptly changing to the commonplace, he added: “No, no. See. We are almost there.”
A turn of the path had brought into view a long, low building, irregularly quadrangular, starkly white against the black wall of pine-trees that screened it from the east. From the heart of it sprouted upwards like a burnt-red mushroom the circular tiled roof of a chapel.
“For to-night that should be the end of our journey. If I am fortunate, Diego, it may also be a beginning.” He resumed his whimsical tone, as if thinking aloud rather than addressing another. “The Prior, I am told, is a man of learning who commands the ear of a Queen, having once been her confessor. To confess a woman is commonly to hold her afterwards in a measure of subjection. One of the lesser mysteries of our mysterious life. But we walk delicately, asking nothing. In this world, my child, to ask is to be denied and avoided. It’s a lesson you’ll learn later. In order to possess what you lack, study to let none suspect that you seek it. Display to them, rather, the advantages to themselves of persuading you to accept it. They will then be eager to bestow. It is too subtle, Diego, for your innocent mind. Indeed, for long it eluded even mine, which is far from innocent. We go to test it now upon this good Franciscan.”
It is among the obiter dicta of the good Franciscan of whom he spoke, Frey Juan Perez, who was Prior of the Convent of La Rabida, that the temper of a man’s soul is commonly displayed in his voice. It is possible that Frey Juan’s was more subtly attuned than the common ear. It is possible that his wide experience as a confessor—in which capacity he commonly heard without seeing, so that his consciousness would be centred in his hearing—had led him to discover a definite affinity between the spiritual qualities and the tone and pitch of voice of a penitent whose countenance was rendered invisible to him by the screen of the confessional.
Be that as it may, certain it is that but for this settled conviction of Frey Juan’s our wayfarer would not so easily have attained his ends.
The Prior was pacing the courtyard at about the hour of compline, which is to say at sunset. The Borgia Pope, whose special devotion to the Virgin was to originate the Angelus, had not yet ascended St. Peter’s throne. As Frey Juan paced, breviary in hand, reading with moving lips, as is canonically prescribed, the office of the day, his attention was disturbed by a voice addressing the lay-brother who kept the gate.
“Of your charity, my brother, a little bread and a cup of water for this weary child.”
There was nothing in the actual words, commonplace enough at a convent doorway, to claim the Prior’s notice; but the voice, and, more than the voice, the contrast between the conscious pride that rang through its veiling huskiness and the humility of the request it uttered, might have compelled the attention of an ear even less sensitive than Frey Juan’s. Its accent was definitely foreign, and the dignity of its intonation gathered increase perhaps from the precision with which a cultured man must be expressing himself in a language other than his own.
Frey Juan, whom we are not to acquit of a very human curiosity, especially in any matter that promised distraction from the gentle monotony of life at La Rabida, closed his breviary upon his forefinger, and stepped round an angle of the courtyard to view the speaker.
At a glance he recognized how perfectly the voice became the man whom he beheld. He discovered power spiritual and physical as much in his shapely height and upright carriage as in his shaven face with its strong line of jaw and aquiline nose. But it was chiefly his eyes that held the Prior: full eyes of a clear grey, luminous as those of a visionary or a mystic, eyes whose steady gaze few men could find it easy to support. He had set down his bundle on the stone bench at the gate. But neither that nor the rest of the stranger’s shabby details could obscure in Frey Juan’s discerning scrutiny the man’s inherent distinction. Beside him the child, on whose behalf he sought that meagre hospitality, gazed upwards in round-eyed wistfulness at the approaching Prior.
Frey Juan advanced with a clatter of loose sandals, a barrel of a man in a grey frock. His face was long and pallid, with a deal of loose flesh about it, but made genial by the humour in the eyes and about the heavy-lipped mouth. He greeted the stranger with a kindly smile, and in formal Latin, to test perhaps his scholarship, or perhaps his faith, for that aquiline nose above the full lips need not be Christian.
“Pax Domini sit tecum.”
To which the wayfarer answered formally, with a grave inclination of his proud head: “Et cum spiritu tuo.”
“You are a traveller,” quoth the Prior unnecessarily, whilst the lay-brother stood aside in self-effacement.
“A traveller. Newly landed here from Lisbon.”
“Do you go far to-night?”
“Only as far as Huelva.”
“Only?” Frey Juan raised his thick brows. “It is a good ten miles. And by night. Do you know the way?”
The wayfarer smiled. “Direction should suffice for one trained to find his way over the trackless ocean.”
The Prior caught a vaunting note in the answer. It prompted his next question. “A great traveller?”
“Judge if I may so describe myself. I’ve sailed as far as northern Thule and southern Guinea, and eastwards to the Golden Horn.”
The Prior sucked in his breath, and scanned the man more shrewdly, as if suspicious of a claim so vast. The scrutiny must have reassured him, for at once he grew cordial.
“That is to have touched the very boundaries of the world.”
“Of the known world, perhaps. But not of the actual world. Not by many a thousand miles.”
“How can you assert that, never having seen it?”
“How can your paternity assert that there is a Heaven and a Hell, never having seen them?”
“By faith and revelation,” was the grave answer.
“Just so. And in my case, to faith and revelation I may add cosmography and mathematics.”
“Ah!” Frey Juan’s prominent eyes considered him with a deepening interest. “Come you in, sir, in God’s name. It is draughty here, and the evening chill. Close the gate, Innocencio. Come you in, sir. We were shamed if we had no better hospitality than that of your modest prayer.” He took the stranger by the sleeve to draw him on. “What is your name, sir?”
“Colon. Cristobal Colon.”
Again Frey Juan’s shrewd eyes scrutinized the Semitic lines of that lofty countenance. There were New Christians of that name, and he could call to mind more than one consigned by the Holy Office to the fire as relapsed judaizers.
“Your way of life?” he asked.
“I am a mariner and a cosmographer by trade.”
“A cosmographer!” The tone implied that the Prior’s interest was increased by the description; as, indeed, it was; for Frey Juan was a scholar whose wide studies included, as Colon had been informed, the provoking mysteries of cosmography.
A bell began to toll. Lights from the leaded gothic windows that overlooked the courtyard, the windows of the chapel, beat dimly upon the lingering daylight.
“It is the hour of vespers,” said Frey Juan. “So I must leave you. Innocencio will conduct you to our guest-chamber. We shall see each other again at supper. Meanwhile we shall supply the needs of your child. It is understood that you spend the night with us.”
“You are very good to a stranger, Sir Prior,” was Colon’s acknowledgment of an invitation upon which he had counted, and for which he had angled in his vaunting self-description.
Frey Juan, no less disingenuous, was content to answer by a wave of deprecation. For kindly man though he was, it was not kindness only that prompted the hospitality. If he knew his world, this was no ordinary traveller. There might be profit in talk with such a man; and if not profit, at least entertainment such as came too rarely into Frey Juan’s present claustral life.
The lay-brother held a door; but Colon hung back, to express himself in terms that reassured the Prior on the score of his faith.
“To rest is less urgent than to give thanks to God and Our Lady for having led my steps to so hospitable a house. By your leave, father, I will go with you to vespers. For the tender little one it is different. If our brother will take him meanwhile in his care, it will deepen my obligation.”
He stooped to speak to the child, who, born and bred in Portugal, had stood intent but puzzled by this talk in unknown Castilian. What he said, holding the promise of refreshment, sent the lad eagerly to the lay-brother’s side. From the gothic portal of the chapel his father watched him go, with eyes that were tender. Then he turned abruptly.
“I keep your reverence.”
With a kindly smile the Prior waved him on into the little chapel of Our Lady of Rabida, whose image enjoyed miraculous fame as a prophylactic against madness.
The bell ceased. The friars were already in the choir, and leaving Colon in the empty nave, Frey Juan went on and up to his place.