The Sisterhood (36 page)

Our escorts took care to avoid villages, and if they spotted shepherds they would veer off to keep out of their sight. We slept in the open wrapped in our cloaks, surviving on dried fruit and mutton, almonds, and cheese, drinking from the mountain springs. Finally drawing close to Seville we were glad to be able to ride again, and to buy bread and oil and a little wine. Marisol looked eagerly at everything, saying how interesting the world was beyond the convent.

I was uneasy. To me, the familiar streets and cathedral towers of Seville meant only danger. Remembering how Maria and I had escaped, giddy with relief and daring, I wondered whether my guardian had appropriated all my fortune to himself or whether the Inquisition had clawed it from him. Every day I thought of Don Jaime with love and gratitude for engineering my escape, and said a prayer for his safety.

The city overwhelmed us with its noise and bustle. The convent sounds were bells and prayers and birdsong, the murmur of the schoolroom, the hush of the library by day and the mountain wind by night. At the docks, sailors shouted and swore and called orders, soldiers and priests and friars hurried in twos and threes, mules brayed, whips cracked, cargoes were loaded, sails snapped in the breeze, men drank and sang, and prostitutes called shrilly from the shadows. The other girls and even Sor Emmanuela exclaimed
with excitement at the sight of so many great-masted ships towering into the sky.

“Look!” cried Marisol. “The
Torre del Oro
!” We craned our necks to see the great watchtower that guarded the docks, an astonishing sight, dazzling gold in the afternoon sunshine. Marisol said it was called the “Tower of Gold” because a lady with golden hair had been imprisoned there by King Pedro the Cruel when she would not love him. Sor Emmanuela said nonsense—it was called the tower of gold because its yellow tiles reflected the light. Behind her back, Marisol made a face.

Sor Emmanuela shooed us up the gangplank between the sailors so quickly that Marisol stumbled and nearly slipped into the river. She muttered an oath. Down below, where it was very hot, we saw the captain had curtained off a section of the dark hold for us, with five small bunks that someone had attempted to make comfortable with cushions. The bunks were only a plank in width and the cushions left no room for our persons. Sanchia scrambled onto the highest one and giggled as she tumbled off. Soon we were all laughing, even Sor Emmanuela, pondering the best way to step over and around each other in such a small quarters and lamenting the lack of space for a chamber pot.

Then the porters brought our trunks and bundles. It appeared impossible that space could be found anywhere for our small trunks. But finally they were wedged in and we piled our bundles containing a change of linen for the voyage and our prayer books on top. Sor Emmanuela hung a crucifix on a nail protruding from the wall. On deck above our heads we heard the sailors shouting, then footsteps, and a great thump that Sor Emmanuela said was the gangplank. We could feel the ship begin moving down the river. We were away! And very hot, though a little fresh air comes from the open hatch. Marisol was longing to go up on deck, but Sor Emmanuela forbids it. Marisol is sulking.

We have said our evening prayers together, eaten some hard bread and dried meat, and shifted about to find enough space to lie down. But excitement keeps us all awake. That and the suffocating heat.

In the hot, light evenings at sea, I took the Chronicle from its wrapping of oiled wool and read the Latin Gospel. Now I have a new burden of dangerous knowledge that, considered logically, undoes any justification for Christian persecution of Jews and Muslims, and testifies to what we believe in common. And I cannot unknow it. It burns in my brain like the fire the Inquisition would throw me into, the fire I watched consume those poor people long ago.

The ship has begun to move continually with the swell of the sea, and Sor Emmanuela and Pia are violently ill. The hold smells of vomit, and water has leaked into the corners to make it damp as well as smelly. Sor Emmanuela was too sick to forbid Marisol to go on deck, and Sanchia and I followed her, desperate for fresh air. The salt breeze revived us and the endless sea is a marvelous sight, a world made of water. Stretching to the sky! It seems impossible that land lies beyond it.

At first the sailors eyed us warily, but grew friendlier as the days passed. They promised it would be an easy passage, and described the place we were bound. They said it was crossed by all the peoples of the world; Levantine and Genoese merchants, turbaned men with skins black as night, silk-clad Chinese, and grandees in cloaks worked with gold. In the markets we would find strange fruit, silks, spices, and fish with rainbow scales. We would know the grandees’ ladies because they went veiled in black, attended by unveiled mestiza servants in bright clothes.

The sea air agreed with Marisol. Her eyes sparkled, her cheeks were pink, and she unbraided her hair to let it blow in the wind. The sailors vied with each other to make her laugh. After a few days Sor
Emmanuela came to sit on deck, too, to let the sun ease a bad cough and a chill caught from lying in the damp hold. Pia sat silently by her side, ignoring the sailors who gazed stupefied at her moonlight hair.

The floor of our quarters grew wetter and the bottoms of our trunks were soaked, but on deck the air was delightful, and the warm wind filled the sails. We spent as little time below as possible, saying our prayers and eating our meals on deck. Our hard bread, baked from salted flour, was dipped in a little olive oil to soften it, and we had olives and dried figs and sour wine from the barrels on board. The seagulls swooped and cried overhead and the world was an endless vista of water and light. How I wished my father could have seen it.

We were enjoying our meal on deck as usual one day, watching the horizon rise and fall, trying to imagine what sort of husbands we would find, when Sanchia cried, “Look.” She pointed to the sky where little puffy clouds on the horizon were spreading across the sky with great speed. At first a thin haze dimmed the sun, and then became a dark canopy of cloud. The wind suddenly blew harder and colder. The sails snapped over our heads and the sea turned from blue green to black and the waves grew rougher. We watched this transformation anxiously, as did the sailors. The captain snapped orders that the men moved very quickly to obey. A sailor shoved us unceremoniously through the open hatch and down the ladder back into the hold as more orders were shouted and other sailors rushed about pulling in the sails and tightening ropes.

We could never have imagined anything so terrible as the storm that struck like a blow from the hand of the Almighty. Soon our ship was rocking, then heaving and plunging up and down through great waves and a half light through which nothing could be seen. A cold wave washed over the deck and poured down into
our hold. The sailors cried out that we must not be afraid, and slammed the hatch shut.

The storm seemed to grow worse and worse. We were frightened and in the hours and days that followed, lost track of time as we clung together in the dark, bruised, dizzy, and sick with the pitching of the ship, unable to keep down dry biscuits or the brackish water, praying continually, sleeping fitfully to wake again to fear and cold…

Water sloshed ankle-deep around us. Our habits were soaked through and Sor Emmanuela could not stop coughing and complained of pain in her chest. A day or two later she was feverish. We took it in turns to sit by her side as we tossed, bracing ourselves upright to support her and sponging her hot face as best we could. Marisol managed to unpack some medicine, but it did Sor Emmanuela no good and she began gasping, saying she could not breathe. She grew worse, unable to talk, until finally, with great racking breaths, poor Sor Emmanuela died. On our knees, shivering and clutching each other for support in the rolling and shuddering hold, we commended her soul to God. We folded her rosary around her stiffening fingers and, having no winding sheet, wrapped her body in her beata’s cloak. I managed to retrieve the Abbess’s medal and for safety put it around my own neck.

Marisol crawled to the curtain that separates our quarters from the rest of the ship and called that it had pleased God to take Sor Emmanuela. Two sailors, whose turn it was to snatch a few moments of rest, struggled from their hammocks and, bracing themselves against the motion of the ship, swung the body up between them and staggered out. We knew Sor Emmanuela would be dropped into the sea. “We shall soon follow!” exclaimed Marisol through chattering teeth.

We all strained to hear the splash the body made when it went overboard. Just when we thought it must have done so, the wind howled ferociously and a great wave struck the ship so hard that
it went onto its side, slamming us against the wall. Then we felt it carried up and up to a terrifying height and, as we clutched each other, plunged sickeningly down with such force it threw us apart and must surely have broken the ship in pieces. Sanchia screamed for her mother. I saw my father’s face, and Pia and Marisol had buried their faces in each other’s shoulders. Above the wind there was shouting on the deck above and a great crack and screams. There was a cry of “man overboard.” We said a prayer for him and for ourselves, and Sanchia began reciting in Hebrew the same phrase over and over again. We looked at each other and whispered “farewell,” as death approached in every groan, in every creak of the ship’s straining, weakening timbers.

“They say drowning is quick,” whispered Pia. Marisol whimpered.

Then there was another presence in the room.

“Can you see her?” gasped Sanchia and pointed.

Pia opened her eyes with an effort. “Yes!”

Marisol stared, past speech for once.

I thought it an apparition of the sea, like the half-woman half-fish creatures that lure sailors to their death on the rocks. But it was a lady in a cloak, just as the Chronicle described her, and I knew—as the others did not—who it was. The Foundress had come to succor us in the hour of our deaths, to speak words of comfort as I joined my father and mother in paradise.

I was mistaken. The Foundress spoke sharply, saying that in our present condition we would make poor sport for the fish, and that we would not drown. The storm had nearly blown itself out; we must trust in God and all would be well. Then she bent over me and said that the medal I had saved was a precious thing, a gift from her brother long ago. I tried to answer that I knew, but she held a finger to my lips and told me firmly to have courage, and someday the medal and the Chronicle would
have a role to play in bringing peace in a time of trouble when Christians, Jews, and Muslims were at war with one another again. Then she was gone.

“They say that drowning people see strange sights in the moment before they die,” said Pia faintly. This was not the time for explanations about what we had seen. Instead I said with as much force as I could muster, “She said we will not drown yet. Have courage, we must only have courage.”

That evening, the storm abated and we could feel the sea grow calmer. The winds subsided, and the captain shouted through our curtain, “The sky is clearing and the lookout has spotted a flock of birds in the distance. That means land ahead. Land! God is great!”

“
Deo gratias
,” we answered him automatically, and fell into an exhausted sleep in each other’s arms.

Stumbling onto the deck next morning, we saw a thin line on the horizon, and as we drew closer we saw the outline of masts against the sky, then finally the port itself. Around us the sailors hurried about their tasks, laughing and slapping each other on the backs, talking of rum and women. Natives rowed out to us in long narrow boats, bringing strange yellow fruits that tasted sweet as honey, and fresh water that was sweeter still. We looked at each other, pale and thin, blinking in the daylight like underground creatures. “We must look like sea witches,” said Marisol, tugging futilely at her soiled and crumpled gown. “These were hideous enough when clean. We’ll never find husbands like this!”

My relief that we were not dead at the bottom of the sea became anxiety about more practical matters. What we would do once ashore? I climbed down to our cabin and calculated our resources. In Sor Emmanuela’s trunk were our dowries, four pouches of
reales
. There was also a purse of coins for our expenses. I was counting them when the others called me to come; the gangplank was nearly down. I cannot write again until we are a little settled. Somewhere.

Of the Matter of the Holy Sisters of Jesus and of the Matter of an Examination of the Convent of Las Golondrinas for the Discovery of Heresy and Enemies of the True Faith among Them