The women rose from the water covered in fringed prayer-shawl tallises of water and light. Water that rivered down their skin and fell in moon-bright droplets onto the sand. Moishe and Columbus followed, meek as virgins on their way to spring sacrifice, but led by their keeper’s tucheses, a voluptuary prophet’s round and gluteus vision of both halves of a transcendent world, suggestively tectonic as they moved.
On the beach by a fire, the bo’sun was kneeling before a broad balebosteh of a woman. More Venus of Düsseldorf than a twiggy Giacometti, she was an impressive piece of living shed-sized statuary. Higgs gazed up at her as before an altar and she smiled and kitsled tickled his ears.
Moishe and Columbus now kneeled on the sand beside the bo’sun, their eyes turned to glass. The three women had donned strange robes made of coconut shells, long reeds, mother-of-pearl, and mussels resembling the nether-part knishes of creatures of an elder world. They gathered around the fire, drinking wine.
The parrot was given its own bowl and he drank while gazing at me. Intermittently he chirruped boozily, a low vibration that I felt in my cloaca. I became shikkered drunk by proxy, grinning the idiotic shmendrick-smile of the besotted. I stood on the sand beside the others, dazed by expectation, desire, and some sorcerous variety of island legerdemain.
Then without warning, they threw their capes, which were actually sacks, over the men’s heads and bound them. I woke from my stupor and flew into a tall palm away from my parrot.
I never even knew his name.
If I did, I’d beak him a thousand bespoke curses.
May an unspecified illness, vast and endless as our illusions, fress upon each of your cellwalls until you fall as miserable soup from the wretched sky.
Spanish soldiers rushed from the rainforest and seized Moishe, Columbus and the bo’sun.
“Release me for I am Admiral and Viceroy,” Columbus protested from within his bag. “I am Governor of—”
A soldier paid speedy tribute by puter-kletsling him below his equator with his knee and he collapsed to the sand. Another shmitzed Moishe with a stick and he fell.
The bo’sun quickly lay down on the sand and was silent.
A Spanish captain, fussy with big macher fur and brocade, stumped out of the forest and onto the beach. Behind him, a disheartened procession of Columbus’s crew, bound and led by rope.
“Buenas Noches!” the captain said, bowing slightly toward the bagged Columbus. He was a small blancmange of a man, red-bearded with but one eye, and it like the dull gallstone of a rat. He spoke as if reading the lines of a dandy stage villain. “I am known as Panfilo de Narváez, captain, commander and governor of these northern regions of Cíbola, so appointed by their most refulgent sovereigns, Ferdinand and Isabella.”
He addressed the bags on the beach.
“It is a pleasure to welcome one who is so distinguished, and who has discovered so much. I trust that you will discover much more as our prisoner. And so, too, your esteemed Hebrew confrère, Moishe, the less-than-a-yardarm pirate—because, as we well know, it was not only his sail that was trimmed.”
He paused for history to appreciate his bon mots.
“Ach, gey kaken afn yam,” I wished to say. “May you release your bowels upon the open ocean and may sharks take interest in your sphincter. May their teeth seek hacksaw passage to the twisted phylactery of your intestines.”
But I’d wait. There’d be time for bile. First I had to rescue Moishe. The captain stood over the three sacked men.
“We have played this pretty masked ball of singing sirens for two reasons. We wished to catch you alive, Master Christophorus, who is now desired at court. We shall transport you in chains, for your gubernatorial misdeeds have displeased our sovereigns. We have herded together your entire crew, who—in the unlikely event that they should have wished it—cannot now do anything to save you, but will be of help in our plantations.”
He regarded the burlap sacks with disdain.
“We also wish to secure some particular charts from the circumcised circumnavigator, Moishe,” he said, focussing on the bound feet that he assumed—incorrectly—to be Moishe’s.
“There is a particular book—once buried like storybook treasure—which for a time was in the possession of the now-departed Grand Inquisitor,” the Spanish captain said. “And there is a map. I now command you, in the name of Ferdinand and Isabella, and in the name of the Holy Father to give them to me.”
From within the sack, there was only prepling muttering from the bo’sun.
“Provide me one or the other or you shall burn like kindling. Except with screaming.”
Then there was more than mumbling. “It is I. Higgs.”
“I do not know this name.”
“The bo’sun. I led them here to you. I doused their food with the philtre that you gave me. I am your shipboard man, your spy.”
“A spy who cannot be silent should be made so,” the captain said. In one ampersanding motion, he drew his sword and plunged it into the loquacious sack.
Then he moved one sack to the west.
“My odds in this thimblerig shell game have just increased,” he said to Moishe’s sack. “The map or the books?”