The Confusion

From this point of view—or any point of view, for that matter—it did not look like a fabled citadel of inconceivable wealth. If the Spaniards had built Manila anywhere else, her church-spires and watch-towers would have reached into the clouds. As it was, even the noblest buildings hugged the ground and had a stoop-shouldered look about them, because they had learned the hard way that anything more than two storeys high, and built of stone, would be brought down by an earthquake while the mortar was scarcely dry. So as Jack stood there on Minerva‘s deck he perceived Manila as something very dark, low, and heavy, and overlaid with smoke and humidity, softened only a little by the high coconut palms that lined her shore.

 

This was just the sort of weather that culminated in a bracing thunder-shower—a fact Minerva‘s crew knew well, for Manila had been their home port for most of the three years since the ship had made her maiden voyage out of Malabar, and at any rate half the crew had grown up along the shores of this bay. They also knew that this bay offered no protection from north winds, and that a big ship like Minerva would be cast away if she were caught between Cavite and Manila when the wind shifted round that way; she would run aground in the shallows and fall prey to Tagalians who would come out in their tree-trunk boats and Chinese sangley s who would come out in their sampans to salvage her. So instead of being boisterous, as one might reasonably expect of sailors who’d just made a perilous and improbable voyage to Japan and back, they were solemn as monks on Sunday, and angrily shushed anyone who raised his voice. Malabaris had suspended themselves in the ratlines like spiders in webs and were hanging there motionless with eyes half closed and mouths half open, waiting for meaningful stirrings in the air.

 

The sky and air were all white, and of a uniform brightness, so that it was impossible to get even a general notion of where the sun might be. According to the hour-glasses they used to keep track of watches, it must be an hour or so before sunset. The whole bay was as still and hushed as Minerva‘s upperdeck; the only noise, therefore, came from the vast shipyard that spread along the shore below the sullen arsenal of Cavite. There five hundred Filipino slaves were at work under the whips and guns of helmeted Spaniards, constructing the largest ship Jack had ever seen. Which, considering the places he had been, meant that it was very likely the largest ship the world had seen since Noah’s Ark had run aground on a mountain-top and been broken up for firewood.

 

Piled on the shore in pyramids were the stripped boles of giant trees that these Filipinos, or others in the same predicament, had cut down in the bat-infested jungles that crowded in along the shores of Laguna de Bay (a great lake just inland of Manila) and floated in rafts down the Pasig. Some of the workers were cutting these into beams and planks. But the great ship was close to being finished and so the demand for huge timbers was not what it had been months ago when the keel and frames had stood out like stiff fingers against the sky. Most of the laborers were concerned with finer matters now: making cables (indeed, Manila made the finest cordage in the world), caulking joints between hull-planks, and doing finish carpentry on the cabins where the most ambitious merchants of the South Seas would dwell for most of the next year, or drown within weeks, depending on how it went.

 

“Dad, either my eyes play tricks, or else you’ve finally traded in that Mahometan spadroon for proper armaments,” said Daniel Shaftoe, eyeing the katana and wakizashi of Gabriel Goto, thrust into Jack’s belt.

 

“I’ve been trying to grow accustomed to ’em,” Jack allowed, “but it’s all for naught. One-handed is how I learned to fight, and it’s all I’ll ever know. I wear these to honor Goto-san, but when next I venture into some place where I might need to do some defensing, it’s the Janissary-sword I’ll be wearing.”

 

“Aw, it ain’t that hard, Dad,” said Jimmy, coming up to shoulder past his brother. “By the time we reach Acapulco we’ll have you swingin’ that katana like a Samurai.” Jimmy patted the hilt of a Japanese sword, and now Jack noticed that Danny was armed in the same manner.

 

“Been broadening your horizons?”

 

“Manila is better than the ‘varsity,” Danny proclaimed, “as long as you remain a step ahead o’ that pesky Spanish Inquisition...”

 

“From the fact that Moseh is still alive, and has all his fingernails, I’m guessing you succeeded there.”

 

“We fulfilled our obligations,” Jimmy said hotly. “We took lodgings on the edge of the barangay of the Japanese Christians—”

 

“—an orderly place—” Danny offered

 

“Perhaps a bit too orderly,” Jimmy said. “But we were hard up against the wicker walls of the sangley neighborhood, which is a perpetual riot, and so whenever the Inquisitors came after us we withdrew into that place for a while, and kept a sharp eye on one another’s backs until such time as Moseh could settle the matter.”

 

“I did not appreciate that Moseh had any such influence with the Sons of Torquemada,” Jack said.

 

“Moseh has let it be known, to a few of the Spaniards, what we are planning,” said Danny. “Suddenly those Spaniards are our friends.”

 

“They call off the Inquisitor’s dogs whenever Moseh lets out a squawk,” Jimmy said airily.

 

“I wonder what their friendship will cost us,” Jack said.

 

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