The Seven Serpents Trilogy (3 page)

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 forest 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.

 

T
HE 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.

“Let us now ask for rain,” he said, and the three of us knelt while I prayed, beseeching God to hear our supplications.

After five days, when water once more ran low, our prayers were answered. It came on to rain, a steady downpour that we caught in sails and sluiced into our casks. With the ten casks we had taken from the
Santa Cecilia
filled to the brims, the captain was now certain that our supply would last until we made a landfall.

Easterly winds remained steady and we made good progress, logging an average of 130 Roman miles for each day of seven. On the seventh day, Captain Roa changed course and we followed a rule he had discovered somewhere in his travels: “Sail southward until the butter melts, then sail to the west.”

But despite the fine weather and our steady progress westward, the crew began to grumble. We were now some twenty-seven days from the mouth of the Gua dalquivir and eighteen days from Grand Canary. The time seemed longer to men who all their lives had trod the cobbled streets of Seville, never the deck of a bob bing caravel. There was no talk of coming to the end of the earth and falling off into a fiery chasm or coming upon monstrous sea animals that could consume a ship in one swallow. Columbus had dispelled these fears several years before. I think it was our encounter with the
Santa Cecilia
that unnerved them.

In any event, to quiet the crew before serious trouble arose, Captain Roa began to keep two separate logs. One was a record of the actual miles we covered each day, which he held secret from the crew. The other was a log that was given out only after it had been changed. Thus, on a day when we covered 130 miles, Roa might add twenty and post our run as 150 miles. He had learned this ruse from Columbus. It has worked for him and it worked now for Captain Roa.

Toward evening on the fourteenth day of good weather, still running with a brisk wind at our stern under sunny skies, the watch saw a gull-like bird of sooty mien circle the caravel and land high upon our mainmast. Whereupon the watch cheered, and those who were sleeping roused themselves and all to a man danced upon the deck.

I watched them from the sterncastle, waiting until they quieted down and the barber had finished curling Don Luis's beard before I got ready to sing the Salve Regina.

“A childish lot,” Don Luis said.
“
A feathered visitor makes them dance. Call the captain; I want a word with him.”

Captain Roa explained that the bird was a
rabo de junco.
“They are often found near land. But sometimes not. Columbus spied such a bird and thought he was within twenty-five leagues of a landfall. Columbus was wrong.”

“This is not the story you'll tell the crew,” Don Luis said.

“No, I will say that it is a happy sign. But they al ready think this.”

“Is it? Tell me, is the bird that sits there on its lofty perch an omen of good or of evil?”

“By my reckonings, should fair weather continue, we are three days' hard sailing from the island of Hispaniola.”

In fine spirits, I sang and played, and everyone on the
Santa Margarita
joined in, even the cutthroat crew and Baltasar Guzmán.

 

T
OWARD EVENING THE NEXT DAY WE OVERTOOK A LARGE SEAGOING
canoe crowded with Indians. We moved up into the wind and sat dead in the water while the dugout, which was as long as our caravel, came up beside us, propelled by what must have been three dozen men using long colored paddles.