Immortal At Sea (The Immortal Chronicles Book 1) (2 page)

This mindset goes way back, as far as Babylonia at least, in the lines of kings who thought themselves granted kinghood by whatever deity they worshipped.  It was never,
I am king because my father before me was king,
it was always,
The gods want me to be king because I am better than everyone else on Earth
.  That’s how it was for a rich man like Juan Pedro de Hoyos, who didn’t have to feel bad about being rich for one second of his life on the planet, because his riches were proof that he was just a better person than the rest. 

His plan, then, was to go to India personally and meet with whichever spice merchant he could find—or maybe he was hoping I knew a guy—and when they saw his awesomeness they would be compelled to trade with him instead of anybody Portugal was sending over.

The third thing he was bringing was money, and on that he was at least thinking straight, because once everyone finished laughing he was going to need money to secure any trade arrangement, and probably to buy up the nearest brothel for a few days when he discovered no Indian merchant was going to screw over the Portuguese for him.

I would have skipped the voyage if I could have.  He’d been talking about it for months and I honestly didn’t take him seriously because he had also been talking about sacking Rome with an army and declaring himself pope, and building a palace of gold in the Americas.  I had no reason to think this plan of the three was the one he was actually going through with.  That was why, on the day of the supposed departure, I was still in the city rather than in some safe place where he couldn’t find me.

“Are you ready for our adventure, Giovanni?” he greeted me when I arrived at his estate that morning.  (Giovanni was the name I used in Spain and Italy.  I used another name in Portugal, a third in France, and a five or six others depending on where I was.  I mostly use Adam now.)  Since he was my patron, in theory I should have been living on the premises, but I insisted on a villa off the property.  I wanted the freedom to disappear if I had to, and arguably my advice was worth the extra expense.  This did me no good when I failed to disappear on the day of the voyage, but it was a good idea in principle.

“You’re going through with this?” I asked him, as a carriage pulled up to take us to the dock.

“Of course!  But you have packed no clothes!  Not to worry, I’ll send men to the villa for your things so we can leave straight away.”

I spent the ride to the ship trying to think up a way to excuse myself, but couldn’t come up with one.  In reality, I worked for several people and performed a variety of jobs, but as far as Juan Pedro was concerned he was my only source of employment, so naturally where he went, I went as well.  He thought it was charitable, since if he left without me I would be out of work.

When I saw what was waiting for us at the dock I discovered myself equally short of ideas for what to say.

He had gilded his ship.  This is another foolish thing very rich people do sometimes: they put gold on
everything
.  Conspicuous wealth as a display of importance is something the western world picked up from the Romans.  It was later perfected in both Constantinople and the Vatican, and is still really popular now.  It’s also been stupid for nearly that long.

“Impressive is it not?  Imagine how impressed the Hindus will be when they see this at port!”

“Very impressed, milord,” I said.  “I only hope the merchants are willing to give you a fair price when seeing how much gold you have to spare.”

Juan Pedro laughed and clapped me on the shoulder.  As always, the point I was trying to make had rushed past him unnoticed.  “Indeed!”

We were soon aboard, and to his credit Juan Pedro had built for us an impressively comfortable cabin and had packed a formidable quantity of Spanish wine, which I began drinking immediately.  This helped, but only in the sense that it made it harder for me to contemplate going anywhere, and as we sailed from the docks I gave up any thoughts of tossing myself overboard and swimming back to shore.  India wasn’t really that bad, I decided, so why
not
take a trip there?

This wasn’t one of my better decisions.

*   *   *

It was two or three days before I made it out of the cabin for any reason other than to relieve myself or change out a chamber pot.  I’d have gone out sooner but Juan Pedro had been wildly sick almost from the moment we took to sea, having made the unwelcome discovery that boats rock about a lot and seasickness is a real thing.  I had the glorious job of making sure he didn’t choke on his own vomit, and also that when he did vomit it went into a receptacle and not onto one of the plush pillows lining the room.

When we weren’t discussing how miserable he was we talked about Greek philosophy.  Juan Pedro wanted to be a great thinker, but he couldn’t get out of his own way.

“It seems to me if Plato didn’t know what a chair was, he should have asked around.  I would have told him.”

“This is what you’ve concluded?”  I had left him with questions to self-interrogate on the nature of forms and objects.

“I have.  I thought of it just recently, between bits of sickness.  I believe nausea to be a great clarifier.”

“The point isn’t whether or not Plato knew what a chair was, it was how
we
know what a chair is.  You recall he made the same point regarding animals, and so on.”

“I would have explained it to him.  It’s amazing to me that people have been talking about Plato all this time and the man didn’t know how to tell a dog from a cat from a chair.  It seems to me the point of philosophy is to take something obvious and make it sound complicated.”

This was actually a decent insight.  Plato was nearly as insufferable as Juan Pedro—for wildly different reasons—but he would have loved arguing this point.  (Although Plato loved arguing
any
point.) And in a way I was just as surprised as my patron was that people were still talking about him.

Still, he was missing the central thesis of Plato’s higher forms, which was not a vast surprise.

“Plato is arraigning the notion that there is a deeper truth to basic reality,” I said.  “It may be easier to imagine this as a conversation with the Aristotelian perspective—”

“Yes, yes.  Aristotle.  I remember him.”

“Yes.”  He didn’t remember Aristotle, because we hadn’t actually talked about him yet.  “Maybe it’s best if you just consider, for now, the possibility that there is more beneath the surface.  Think of reality as this ocean.  Below the waves are things we can’t see which affect the things we can.”

This wasn’t close to being a correct analogy, but I was working with what I had.

“All right.   I will think on this.  Thank you, Giovanni.  And I may need a clean bucket.”

*   *   *

I was on the portside railing later, having replaced Juan Pedro’s bucket with a clean receptacle and left him to sleep and think about how stupid Plato must have been.  I was drinking wine from a tin cup and staring at the land in the distance, trying to figure out what land I was staring at.  The captain stepped up beside me.

“How goes the prince?” he greeted.  The captain was an aged Italian named Grillo who confessed in the first conversation we had that he’d not been to sea for fifteen years. Juan Pedro insisted Grillo was the best captain alive, based on whatever sources he used when putting this adventure together.  The same sources told him to buy the ship we were sailing, which was supposed to be the fastest Spain had to offer.  I had doubts on the second point because surely the fastest ship in Spain wouldn’t be quite so easy to buy.

“The worst appears to be over,” I said.  “And if not, I’ll have to continue to drink his wine for him.”

Captain Grillo laughed and clapped me on the shoulder.  “You relax and drink, we will reach India in no time.”

Incidentally, in this era,
no time
meant
several months
. 

Nodding at the land before me, I asked, “When do we head for deeper seas?”

“Oh we won’t go much deeper than this.  I like to keep the shoreline in view.  We’re on a dead run for the Cape of Good Hope.  I’ve charted it out; we should hit the winds right on schedule.”

“Well that’s good.  And if you should
need
to go deeper?”

“For a storm, we’d be better off seeking shelter close to shore rather than further at sea.  That or battening down and riding it.  Not to worry, I know how to navigate.”

“Good, then,” I said, forcing a smile.  I was wondering if I was actually too far away to swim for the land I could barely see, then remembered all the giant things in the water beneath us and decided I didn’t like that option any more than I liked the idea of staying on board.

What Captain Grillo was doing made absolutely perfect sense.  In the days before proper timepieces it was extraordinarily difficult to navigate East-West travel, which involved correctly calculating one’s longitude.  This was important because while a map could tell you where a land mass—or a reef—was, it didn’t tell you when you were going to arrive at it.  To do that you needed the sun or the stars, and you needed to know what time it was at a fixed location.  (The standard now is Greenwich Mean Time.)

The easier solution was to just keep land in view the whole time.  This was reasonable when traveling North-South from Europe to the horn of Africa, and in a perfect world it’s what I would have done too.  It certainly satisfied my concerns about deep oceans and the things that live within them.

But other things lurked near the shore of the African coast.

“Fastest ship in Spain, you say?” I asked Grillo.

“Indeed!”

“I do hope you’re right.”

*   *   *

It was a few weeks of mostly peaceful, storm-free sailing before we saw the other vessel.  It turned up behind us having, I assume, rounded North Africa from Algiers or thereabouts.

“It’s the Portuguese!” declared Juan Pedro with a laugh, the first time he saw them.  “We’re already leagues ahead, by India this gap will surely be a month or more.”

“I’m afraid that’s not likely,” I said.  The captain was shaking his head at me, just subtly enough to escape Juan Pedro’s attention.  “I’ve been looking at the ship for days now, and it seems to me it has either kept pace or gotten larger each day.”

“Captain, is this true?”

“It appears to be so, yes,” he said mildly.

“Then go faster, why don’t you?”

“Yes, lord, of course.  I’ll give the order straight away.”

Once Juan Pedro had disappeared back into his cabin, the captain turned on me.  “Why did you do that?  We could have easily kept him in his cups below deck until they passed.”

I laughed.  “Passed?  Captain, who do you think is behind us?”

“I don’t know.  The have a shallow draft and a wide hull, and they are clearly carrying a lighter load, but I don’t recognize their colors.  Perhaps it
is
the Portuguese.  What does it matter?”

“It matters because that ship will not be passing us.  Why do you suppose the Portuguese route turns wide from shore before here?  Or why if they travel this route it’s only with escort vessels?”

“Pirates?” he gasped.

I had considered giving warning many times, but I couldn’t decide what was the greater risk: pirates, or Grillo’s navigational skills.  My trepidation regarding open ocean travel was clearly a factor in my decision to keep quiet, but it’s also not always wise to challenge a captain on his own ship.  And after a while I convinced myself that he was right, and a straight run for the horn was the most logical choice.

“If you sail the Barbary Coast you risk Barbary pirates,” I said.

“But I ran this route for years without issue.”

“Maybe you did.  Maybe you did it in a faster ship, or in worse weather, and maybe nobody was foolish enough to nail gold plates to any of the boats you captained.”

“We have to go faster.”

“I would say so, yes.”

*   *   *

The ship couldn’t actually go any faster without dumping provisions overboard, and that was an option nobody was prepared to consider.  Juan Pedro did his best to encourage us to sail more rapidly by banging the drum, which only proved he knew nothing about how boats worked.  He had bought a ship that once had oarlocks, but they were sealed up and there were no oars on the vessel.  The drum remained, but it served no purpose aside from calling everyone’s attention in the event of a speech.  So his banging of the drum in a somewhat rhythmic fashion to get the sailors to address the wind more effectively—or whatever he was thinking—did no good other than to annoy everyone.

We decided—
we
being the captain, myself, his first mate, and definitely not Juan Pedro—to head for deeper seas.  As the captain first noted, the pirate ship had a higher draft, which was partly the way their ship was built but also due to a difference in provisions. We were heavy-laden with enough goods to get us around the Cape of Good Hope and to the east coast of Africa before needing to resupply, but the pirates couldn’t go that long.  It was thought that if we sailed away from the African coast—a coast where they could expect to stop for resupply—we might reach a point where the pirates would be forced to either turn around or face starvation.