1492, Mary Johnston [young adult books to read .txt] 📗

DUSK was drawing down as I stole with little trouble out of the house into the street and thence into the maze of Santa Fe. That night I slept with minstrels and jugglers, and at sunrise slipped out of Cordova gate with muleteers. They were for Cordova and I meant to go to Malaga. I meant to find there a ship, maybe for Africa, maybe for Italy, though in Italy, too, sits the Inquisition. But who knows what it is that turns a man, unless we call it his Genius, unless we call it God? I let the muleteers pass me on the road to Cordova, let them dwindle in the distance. And still I walked and did not turn back and find the Malaga road. It was as though I were on the sea, and my bark was hanging in a calm, waiting for a wind to blow. A man mounted on a horse was coming toward me from Santa Fe. Watching the small figure grow larger, I said, “When he is even with me and has passed and is a little figure again in the distance, I will turn south.”

He came nearer. Suddenly I knew him to be that Master Christopherus who had entered the wedge of shadow yesterday in the palace court. He was out of it now, in the broad light, on the white road—on the way to France. He approached. The ocean before Palos came and stood again before me, salt and powerful. The keen, far, sky line of it awoke and drew!

Christopherus Columbus came up with me. I said, “A Palos sailor gives you good morning!”

Checking the horse, he sat looking at me out of blue-gray eyes. I saw him recollecting. “Dress is different and poorer, but you are the squire in the crowd! `Sailor Palos sailor’—There’s some meaning there too!”

He seemed to ponder it, then asked if I was for Cordova.

“No. I am going to Malaga where I take ship.”

“This is not the Malaga road.”

“No. But I am in no hurry! I should like to walk a mile with you.”

“Then do it,” he answered. “Something tells me that we shall not be ill travelers together.”

I felt that also and no more than he could explain it. But the reason, I know, stands in the forest behind the seedling.

He walked his horse, and I strode beside. He asked my name and I gave it. Juan Lepe. We traveled Cordova road together. Presently he said, “I leave Spain for France, and do you know why?”

Said Juan Lepe, “I have been told something, and I have gathered something with my own eyes and ears. You would reach Asia by going west.”

He spoke in the measured tone of a recital often made alike to himself and to others. “I hold that the voyage from Palos, say, first south to the Canaries and then due west would not exceed three months. Yet I began to go west to India full eighteen years ago! I have voyaged eighteen years, with dead calms and head winds, with storms and back-puttings, with pirates and mutinies, with food and water lacking, with only God and my purpose for friend! I have touched at the court of Portugal and at the court of Spain, and, roundabout way, at the court of England, and at the houses of the Doges of Venice and of Genoa. They all kept me swinging long at anchor, but they have never given me a furthering wind. Eighteen years going to India! But why do I say eighteen? The Lord put me forth from landside the day I was born. Before I was fourteen, at the school in Pavia, He said, `Go to sea. Sail under thy cousin Colombo and learn through long years all the inches of salt water.’ Later He said, one day when we were swinging off Alexandria, `Study! Teach thyself! Buy books, not wine nor fine clothes nor favor of women. Study on land and study at sea. Look at every map that comes before you. Learn to make maps. When a world map comes before you, look at the western side of it and think how to fill it out knowingly. Listen to seamen’s tales. Learn to view the invisible and to feel under foot the roundness of my earth!’

“And He said that same year off Aleppo, `Learn to command ships. Learn in King Reinier’s war and in what other war Genoa makes. Learn to direct men and patiently to hear them, winding in and out of their counsels, keeping thyself always wiser than they.’ Well, I studied, and learned, and can command a ship or ships, and know navigation, and can make maps and charts with the best, and can rule seamen, loving them the while. Long ago, I went to that school which He set, and came forth magister! Long after His first speaking, I was at Porto Santo, well named, and there He said, `Seek India, going westward.’ ” He turned his face to the sun. “I have been going to India fifty-six years.”

Juan Lepe asked, “Why, on yesterday, were you not content with the King and Queen’s terms? They granted honor and competence. It was the estate of a prince that you asked.”

Some moments passed before he answered. The sun was shining, the road white and dusty, the mountains of Elvira purple to the tops and there splashed with silver. When he spoke, his voice was changed. Neither now nor hereafter did he discourse of money-gold and nobility flowing from earthly kings with that impersonal exaltation with which he talked of his errand from God to link together east and west. But he drew them somehow in train from the last, hiding here I thought, an earthly weakness from himself, and the weakness so intertwined with strength that it was hard to divide parasite from oak.

“Did you see,” he asked, “a boy with me? That was my son Diego whom I have left with a friend in Santa Fe. Fernando, his half-brother, is but a child. I shall see him in Cordova. I have two brothers, dear to me both of them, Diego and Bartholomew. My old father, Dominico Colombo, still lives in Genoa. He lives in poverty, as I have lived in poverty these many years. And there is Pedro Correo, to whom I owe much, husband of my wife’s sister. My wife is dead. The mother of Fernando is not my wife, but I love her, and she is poor though beautiful and good. I would have her less poor; I would give her beautiful things. I have love for my kindred,—love and yearning and care and desire to do them good, alike those who trust me and those who think that I had failed them. I do not fail them!”

We padded on upon the dusty road. I felt his inner warmth, divined his life. But at last I said, “What the Queen and King promise would give rich care—”

“I have friends too, for all that I ride out of Spain and seem so poor and desolate! I would repay—ay, ten times over—their faith and their help.”

“Still—”

“There are moreover the poor, and those who study and need books and maps that they cannot purchase. There are convents—one convent especially—that befriended me when I was alone and nigh hopeless and furthered my cause. I would give that convent great gifts.” Turning in the saddle he looked southwest. “Fray Juan Perez—”

Palos shore spread about me, and rose La Rabida, white among vineyards and pines. Doves flew over cloister. But I did not say all I knew.

“There are other things that I would do. I do not speak of them to many! They would say that I was mad. But great things that in this age none else seems inclined to do!”

“As what?” I asked. “I have been called mad myself. I am not apt to think you so.”

He began to speak of a mighty crusade to recover the Holy Sepulchre.

The road to Cordova stretched sunny and dusty. Above the mountains of Elvira the sky stood keen blue. Juan Lepe said slowly, “Admiral of the Ocean-Sea and Viceroy and Governor of continents and islands in perpetuity, sons and sons’ sons after you, and gilded deep with a tenth of all the wealth that flows forever from Asia over Ocean-Sea to Spain, and you and all after you made nobles, grandees and wealthy from generation to generation! Kings almost of the west, and donors to the east, arousers of crusades and freers of the Sepulchre! You build a high tower!”

Carters and carts going by pushed us to the edge of road and covered all with dust. He waited until the cloud sank, then he said, “Do you know—but you cannot know what it is to be sent from pillar to post and wait in antechambers where the air stifles, and doff cap—who have been captain of ships!—to chamberlain, page and lackey? To be called dreamer, adventurer, dicer! To hear the laugh and catch the sneer! To be the persuader, the beggar of good and bad, high and low—to beg