The Smell of Telescopes (36 page)

With savage strokes, she cut her hair over the waves. Her image in the foam turned from girl to boy. There was worthwhile work to be found abroad, in the Indies, guarding the treasure ships which supplied Spain with most of its income. Her excellent sense of direction had given her the notion of training as a navigator; the dagger would pay her college fees, and even allow her to take up tobacco, sherbet and some other bad habits. But not the brothel. She would have to enrol disguised as a man of slight build, for ladies were not allowed to work for the fleets. It was vital to forget her femininity, to exaggerate her swagger and curse like the son of a miner or the brother of a bishop. It was prudent also to hide the stolen book. She pushed it to the bottom of one of her deep saddlebags, under her dirty socks.

To Seville she travelled, having perfected a spit and sneer worthy of an exhausted trader who hopes to better himself. A far ride, but the King’s bureaucrats had ordained that city as the centre of his maritime empire, despite its inconvenient location. She traversed the sweltering lands of León and Old Castile, living on her wits, snatching sherry and male attire from unprotected households at night, climbing through open windows with the stealth of a lizard. A cap obscuring her elegant brow, her lips chapped by the relentless sun, she was saluted as a boy by all the farmers she passed. Her strategy was working. Spain was at war with Portugal, but signs of strife out here were few; crops were untrampled. The forces of King Philip were so worthless they were even incapable of retreating in the right direction.

She sold the dagger to a jeweller in Madrid for a vast sum. He was an enemy of the Cadiz family, recognised the insignia on the pommel and bought it without asking a single awkward question. Then it was back to the road, heading south until the mountains of Andalucía shimmered over the dusty plains. These arid ranges were like skeletons of the Picos. A dejection came upon her, but Seville and its college banished it. Señor Alonzo, the ancient chancellor, accepted her application the moment she threw a purse of coins on the threshold, and so she became a student of navigation, an undergraduate, too short to reach her desk but with more determination than the sons of nobles, who idled in the classroom while awaiting their inheritances. The first lecture on the use of the octant befuddled her more than moonshine.

Of her time here, she cared to enjoy little. Thoughts of vengeance were always prodding her to work harder. But her memories of her father and mother, while not losing their significance, became muted. Her hatred for Ugolino moved from her body to her brain; his destruction was now a mental affair and her blood no longer boiled, merely simmered. Peculiar how past experiences settle at the bottom of the mind! They never truly spill from the head but are adulterated with events of the present. The act of forgetting is akin to adding beer to wine: the adjusted life and drink are less palatable to the tongue, which has gone, but more to the gut, which is here. She started to understand how the nature of time is chemical and digestive. In her room she slept under charts for blankets and employed a globe as a cushion.

The college was a miniature state, with its own market gardens and well, and jaunts into Seville were superfluous. She rarely wandered the cloisters, but regularly visited the stables, where her horse grazed on pale hay and the occasional orange. The magic book was still in the bag below her socks; it was safe there, for she frequently changed the foul rags for grubbier ones. No sane nose might sniff this secret. Sometimes she opened the grimoire and struggled to read. One chapter promised the gift of eternal life. It was stamped with Ugolino’s fingerprints, as if studied rigorously. It involved fixing certain weird words in the mind, but she had no idea how to pronounce them. Near the climax of her first term, she went down to the stable and received a nasty shock. She raced to the chancellor and berated him.

“An outrage! My mount has been stolen!”

Señor Alonzo shrugged. “The sailors creep into the campus and ride unguarded steeds back to the ships. Your beast is already on its way to the Indies. There are no appeals.”

“I demand to be awarded my degree now.”

A jangle of coins turned this order into a ceremony. She graduated with honours an hour later, in the chancellor’s office, and was given a polished octant with a leather strap and a signed certificate. Then she ran to the docks and asked for employment with the first rough she met. He regarded her angrily but with a pinch of admiration. He too had been so young when he initially went to sea that he could sleep in a cannon, and new recruits brought him drinking money, even if only for a thimble of stale grog. He took her aboard a blue galleon, low in the water with the mass of its guns, and introduced her to Captain Belial Pérez de Guzmán, who owned a single long eyebrow above a broken nose, and raised it like a rope at her supple bow. Impatiently, he nodded, and Juanita was shown her quarters, a room full of maps.

Her octant hardly left her eye, as if she was calculating a course around the whole world back to her childhood, which was receding on the quayside. She kept watch on deck for the caravel which had abducted her horse and tome of redress. Out in the wild ocean, her stomach disgorged her last student meal: cabbage soup and duck. The sail ahead was always faster, for her ship lumbered like a brass toad. Now it was weevils and seaweed for supper. Once past the Azores she thought she glimpsed large reptilian birds circling an unknown island made of mountains. A mirage? Surely, for this longitude had been searched for potential colonies for centuries without luck. Portugal had snatched the prime rocks here. The King of Spain had cast his imperial mesh further, to the Caribbean. But the net needed to be woven firmer.

Captain Guzmán summoned her to his cabin and fumbled with a goblet of amontillado. His fingers were so encrusted with rings he could raise them only when strictly necessary. Now he gestured wearily like a rusty clock and enticed her to his side.

“Well, boy, what do you think of me?”

“A worthy citizen of Spain, a dutiful master with a burning desire to protect his King’s revenue from pirates and rovers. A commander with a huge heart and an eyebrow for war.”

“Come and sit on my knee. You are quite right about the importance of my mission. Without our treasure fleets, Spain would be penniless. I am thus under a great deal of physical and mental stress. You are young for a navigator, very young. How old? Thirteen? Ah, and my pretty cabin boy fell sick at the last minute.”

Juanita fumed. “Remove your hand from there!”

“What is this? Are you a castrato? Wait, this is horrid sacrilege! Girls are not permitted on a working ship! You have polluted me! To the brig with you! Off, off! Pervert!”

Two burly sailors entered and pulled her below, securing her limbs in manacles. She was marooned in the dark, bilge and rats investigating her ankles and wrists. Now her plans were finished; she had lost energy and opportunity. Perhaps Ugolino had arranged this fate from the start! It was not beyond his wisdom. Her memories surfaced from where they had lurked. Separated from the present, so that the past became now, locked in each passing second, they dominated her identity. Federico killing a rug, kissing her brow, carrying her on his shoulders through the square of Espinama during a fiesta. Marina dancing in the kitchen, learning to play a guitar, describing her lovers as wardrobes with the key still in the lock. And both telling her stories of buccaneers, madmen who licked muskets and boiled boots in a pot.

Her navigational skills, mostly intuitive, were so acute that long confinement did not prevent her from sensing her position in the ocean. It was as if she felt the lines of longitude and latitude on her torso, like a cloak of seaweed. Her father had once run a magnet over her from head to heel. It was feasible this joke had aligned her to the planet’s own magnetic field. Whales, she had heard, could perform this trick. It might be that Federico was not truly her begetter, that one of Marina’s affairs had been cetacean in nature. Unlikely, but not more so than the fact of a steam bull. And she was aware that with every puff of wind in the galleon sails, she was closer to slavery, that Captain Guzmán would sell her to the mines as soon as they reached the coast of Darien. Hope was sunk both in deeps and shafts.

They were not more than ten leagues from Guanahani, and the mighty guns were being loaded to prepare for the task of guarding the merchant ships, when a single howl of terror vibrated through the decks, so that the timbers really did shiver and the empty hammocks swung like gallows in a storm. The cry was many voices joined as one, and Juanita listened to the stamp of feet on the boards above her head. Pirates! Now a clash of swords rose above the other sounds, so harsh that a stream of sparks gushed down the ladder from above, illuminating her prison. What if the attackers were French? Those were the worst buccaneers, offering brutal death with a hint of garlic, cooking men slowly, cutting out tongues or hearts or eyes. Francois l’Olonnais was one; he hated Spaniards so much he even tormented their prisoners.

Soon it was apparent that the entire crew had been hurled over the side and that the new owners of the galleon were searching it for booty or information. A wide figure descended into the brig, with a candle on the crown of a floppy hat. His hair fell in curls, as glossy as her own but longer; his moustache was white with salt. He was no Frenchman, for his voice was too low, an intoxicating rumble. He placed the tip of his cutlass to her throat and smirked.

“Are you another dog of King Philip?”

Juanita lied without a flicker of hesitation. “If so, why should I be shut in here? I am a prisoner.”

“Not Spanish? So where are you from?”

She recalled the grimoire and babbled a few meaningless words from the first chapter. “That is an example of my language. I am a navigator from Atinauj, which is a realm far to the north but close to the south. Have you been there? It is grand.”

“We always have need of skilled men who hate the Spanish. I should like to hire you as our helmsman.”

Juanita wept openly, for this was a chance to complete her revenge on Ugolino, but in a different way from the one originally envisaged. A rover preying on the countrymen who had betrayed her! By weakening King Philip, she would strengthen his anger, and then he would turn on those nearer to him, his enemies within Spain. As they jabbed at him, so must he prod and scratch at the Cadiz tribe. This itch would bleed by proxy, with royal fingers, diamond nails.

“Do not blubber, boy! Are you cousin to squonks?”

“Squonk? What sort of word is that?”

“Name of a creature. A weeper from Pennsylvania.”

“And what is a Pennsylvania?”

“You may see, my lad, when we journey to North America, for I have an accomplice on the East Coast who barters hides for silver. A bad man but true, known as Billy Barnett.”

He released her and introduced her to his crew. They were fearless and proud, for he was Henry Morgan, Welshman, with ambitions to be best buccaneer of any age. She shook hands with the barber, Hugo Olmeijer, a Flem, and the sailmaker, Ghassan Razzaz, from Tunis, and the cook, Phya Srinawk, from Madagascar, and the carpenter, Hjalmar Dagerman, a Swede. Then a fresh life began, exploits beyond her mother’s dreams. The green surf turned ruby as they ploughed it with swords, and the bubbles which rose from the lips of drowning soldiers resembled cherries. She saw the wonders of the Indies. But she also noted things which reminded her too much of the bald ghoul with the flying machine; it was tough to specify what. And she forever debated the issue of whether to declare herself a girl and demand their infatuation.

True, a few lady buccaneers did exist who worked without disguise. There was the pirate queen, Charlotte Gallon, who was sweet and fierce, gentle and dangerous, kind and evil, all at the same time. She was very beautiful, with lustrous black hair, dark eyes and olive skin; when she smiled even sharks and lobsters fell in love. Sailors were desperate to be caught by her, just for the pleasure of walking her plank. Those who survived hoped to be captured again. She drank, gambled and danced more than any man, braving reef and cannon in her quest for a green diamond. No other colour suited her; she cast ordinary gems over the side. Black pearls she kept also, for they shone like her hair. She wore a necklace of seashells and never rose early in the morning, unless her cup of tea was made in exactly the right way.

But Juanita did not feel safe enough with Morgan to admit her true gender. So she remained a fellow and the crew began to judge her as the most masculine hand they had ever met, for she expressed no interest in soft silks or delicate food, but preferred woollen stockings and coarse bread. Her acting was almost too good. Yet she was always very civil to the girls they stole from enemy vessels. She might rip a bodice for the sake of tradition, but would then apologise and offer to repair it. And Morgan, who was obsessed with love, assumed his navigator was remaining true to a wife or mistress in some distant port, which really is a much less likely scenario than that of his ship being steered by a woman. He was Welsh and often confused the two meanings of romance, as if lip and sword can ever have common values.

Morgan’s mentor had just died and he was keen to outwit the memory of the notorious Mansveldt by adventuring beyond all tavern anecdote. A raid on Puerto del Principe made his name as a thief of cattle, but not as a suitable title for a ballad. So he captured a hundred Spanish nuns from a convent and marched on Porto Bello, forcing his prisoners to run at the fort with ladders, and giggling as they were sliced to fragments by the carbines of their own side. Then his men were up the rungs, over the walls, hurling grenades and blasphemy at the defenders. In the wake of this conflict, Juanita contracted the rare tropical disease known as monkeybreath, a grotesque condition but useful for keeping Morgan at an even greater distance. Thus the secret of her identity was locked safer with every sigh of her sick lungs.

Porto Bello was good, but there ought to be more, and Morgan found it in Maracaibo. He sent a fire-ship into the harbour, crewed with logs dressed in caps, and when the Spanish galleons approached to arrest the impudent buccaneers, they found themselves capturing an explosion. This was fine, but not enough, and when the port was drunk dry, the Welshman stood on an empty cask and shouted out in the direction of Panama. Away they sailed to smash that city also, fairest of Spain’s children. Songs were pouring from guitars now, and he, Morgan, wrote the words in deeds and the melodies in gems, but in the Cup of Gold he was vanquished by a woman. Juanita saw it happen; a marvel. His love was none other than La Santa Roja, a fable from her childhood which had not aged. Nor had she, and this was astoundingly strange.