“What did you find? What of cultivated fields and of agriculture?”
“There were rivers, ponds with frogs and fish but no indication of crops. We found no large animals, but strange lizards, snakes and rodents. In the glades, gaudy parrots and bats large as foxes. Small birds drink from flowers, the murmur of their wings like bees. In a clearing, a thousand butterflies, their wings iridescent blue. We filled our baskets with specimens both live and extinguished, which we have here conveyed.”
“Good, good,” Columbus replied. “But tell me of villages, of mining and of gold?”
The King and Queen would not finance another voyage for glimmering wings and large bats.
Luis de Torres continued. “Far into the island’s dark heart, we came upon a village: fifty large wooden huts, palm-thatched. The people came to greet us.” He motioned to the older man with the avian haberdashery. “This is their chief—what they term a ‘cacique.’ Diego spoke with him of gold.”
“Bring the man here. Let us speak with him.”
The cacique, grey-haired, muscular, stepped forward. His aquiline nose and walnut-coloured ears were studded with small pieces of gold.
There was more gold, he said. In the south. Where the Caribs live.
Of course. Gold was where they weren’t.
A first, pre-cinematic “they went that-a-way.”
Gold?
That-a-way.
Oh, and by the way, the Caribs are the people who eat people.
You can pick your friends.
And you can pick your teeth.
And you can pick your friends from your teeth. Sometimes little bits of them get stuck there after a nosh.
Martín Pinzón stood near Columbus’s carved throne, listening. Something was glistering in his rodent brain: gold.
Early next morning Pinzón comandeered the Pinta. He would put his own gilded island on the charts, his own hand into the open jar of the Caribbean. He would sail back to trumpets, parades, fame, and hereditary wealth and power. He would write his own chapter in the history books,
And with the persuasive eloquence of an arquebus, he press-ganged Moishe.
“Board the Pinta,” Pinzón commanded. “You must tend to our pilot, Cristobal Garcia Xalmiento. He suffers.” The Pinta’s surgeon was only help for the removals of either blood or limb and the Santa María’s physician himself lay below deck in a hypnogogic fever, yammering mishegoss about the hairy backs of sailors being sucked by teams of spine-hungry leeches and the heated mouths of glass cups.
And so Moishe, who had assisted physicians aboard Mediterranean ships and as we sailed from Spain, had helped administer salves, bloodletting, and, to be plain, medicines slippery as snakeoil became great khan of the medicine chest.
Moishe, a doctor? His mother would have been so proud.
The pilot, Cristobal Garcia Xalmiento, was splayed on a pallet below deck on the Pinta, the air fetid and constellated with flies.
“Drink,” Moishe said and unstoppered a bottle of Madeira, pouring it between Xalmiento’s dry and trembling lips.
“Jacome,” Moishe called. “We must carry him on deck. He needs new air.”
“Better to whore with a holeless mermaid as to think him salvageable,” Jacome spat.
“Take his legs,” Moishe instructed.
“Better to toss the neargone overboard and feed me the wine,” Jacome said, but still, he hove on Xalmiento’s legs and helped.
Optimism and the open air, and not a frank diagnosis, appeared the best medicine for the man and he soon began to moan. Which was improvement. To feel close to death after feeling nothing was convalescence.
And to kvetch about it meant recovery was likely. Soon he would sing opera and wrest anchors from the seafloor with his teeth.
Pinzón strode about the deck, surveying his mutinous duchy. He was admiral of this floating nutshell yet considered himself king of infinite space: what was undiscovered was boundless and filled with possibility.
All about the ship, the crew was ministering to sheets and yardarms while Moishe in the bow herded Xalmiento away from fever. Pinzón went aft to his cabin. Through the small window, I saw him heave a book from chest to table.
I knew it by the pattern of its cover. We had carried this text from Lisbon—from one Columbus to another. Pinzón had thieved not only boat but book. Onboard were two of the five which spoke of the Fountain. Moishe must find means to poke his nose between the broad flanks of this tome. Such knowledge was power.
The Pinta sailed in search of a new island. Pinzón certainly sought gold. The yellow teeth of his acquisitive grin seemed to desire a grille-work of the stuff. But perhaps he, too, sought, immortality or to become its gatekeeper.
Soon he was back at the binnacle directing the helmsman toward a distant shadow.