Iacobus (36 page)

At the entrance to Brion we got rid of our disguises (although Sara continued to wear men’s clothes and a wide-brimmed hat to cover her hair) and we headed on. We reached Noia at midday, passing through the narrow and stately streets, and went down to the port hoping to find a boat that was heading north along the coast. Some old men were resting on wooden crates at the end of the dock and silhouetted against the mountain, I could seevarious boats abandoned on the sand. I gladly breathed in the salty air; Would this be the start of freedom? Naturally, our arrival had drawn the attention of the locals and we carried on, surrounded by a group of children who shrieked as they ran next to our horses. The old men continued to watch us as we approached.

“What do you want?” one of them asked.

“A coastal boat to take us to the port of Finisterre.”

“You won’t find any until high tide, sir.”

“When will that be?” I asked anxiously; I needed time to do what I had to do.

“Ten to twelve hours,” said the other with a malevolent smile.

“Who should I ask for?”

“For Martiño. He has the biggest boat. He transports livestock and goods from Muros to Cape Touriñan.”

“Does he take passengers?”

“If they pay well.”

“We pay well.”

“Then he will take you wherever you wish.”

“Is there somewhere we can rest until the tide comes in?” Jonas asked.

“The tavern is right over there,” said one of the boys, pointing to a row of small houses along the beach front. “My father will take care of you. He’s the owner.”

I accompanied Sara and Jonas to the door of the establishment and told them I would be leaving them for a few hours.

“Aren’t you coming in?” asked Sara, surprised.

“I can’t,” I explained, placing my hand on her cheek. “I have something important to do. But I will be back before high tide. I promise.”

“I want to go with you!” protested my son.

“No, what I have to do, I must do alone. Anyway, you need to look after Sara until I get back.”

I gave Jonas the reins of the horses and walked away down the cobbled streets, as if my feet knew the way, and ended up in the small cemetery of the Church of St. Mary. How many times had the old masters told me about their own deaths they had faked there? There was no doubt that destiny had reserved the same experience for me. And I was ready.

I stopped in front of the mountains of slabs, piled one on top of the other against the walls of the church, and spent some time looking at the drawings on each of them, drawn in forgotten times. According to the tradition, Noah’s ark had stopped in Noia after the Flood and although this was nothing more than a myth, that myth hid a much more important and secret truth. It is true that following the major disaster that struck the Earth, a ship did arrive at Noia but it wasn’t Noah who sailed that ship, just as it wasn’t St. James who was buried at Compostela.

I turned my attention back to the gravestones. Those stones, that looked like tombstones, were covered in mystical symbols, images and emblems, and lacked any kind of inscription that could identify the supposed death of the owner. It wasn’t difficult to understand the engravings, despite the time that had passed since I had studied that language and, through them, I heard the distant voices of those whom, like myself, had gone there to leave a past life behind forever, renouncing their old beliefs and faiths in search of a new truth.

“Do you understand their meaning?” asked a voice from behind me.

I didn’t turn around. Whoever it was had been waiting for me.

“You know I do,” I said calmly.

“That pile of laudas sepulcrais are blank. Pick yours.”

“Any one will do, don’t worry.”

“Have you eaten, sir?”

“No.”

“Well, please, follow me. Come into the church with me.”

When I left the cemetery at dusk, a new slab was leaning against the south wall of the church. I myself had chiseled in my ancestry and my lineage, my past pains and my solitude, the long love that I had felt for Isabel of Mendoza, my Hospitaller vows, my years in Rhodes, and everything that constituted the biography of Galceran of Born. I had a new identity, a new secret name that I could never reveal but that I must always think of myself as. “Goodbye, past,” I said as I walked away from my own gravestone.

We boarded Martiño’s boat in the middle of the night. It was a solid two-masted vessel, close-hauled, with a long sharp prow, helms that hung from the rudders, and high sides to better resist the onslaught of the sea, so rough and stormy along those coasts. We left Noia crossing the spit towards the Port of Muros to the north and from there we followed the contours of a landscape of rugged cliffs and sandy beaches. Over the next few days we left behind the broad inlet of Carnota, the legendary Mount Pindus, which passed through every possible shade of pink while it was in our sight, and the amazing Waterfalls of Ezaro, where the water from the river flowed into the sea, cascading from a prominent, pointy cliff.

After five days of traveling at sea we were finally approaching Finisterre, the terrible End of the World, the last stronghold inhabited by man before the great kingdom of Atlas, the giant ocean, after which there is only an infinite void, the place where according to history the Roman legions of Decimus Junius Brutus were terrified to see how the Mare Tenebrosum swallowed the sun and made it disappear; in short, the last land that the dead trod before boarding Hermes’ boat to be taken to Hades … We could have arrived much sooner but Martiño approached land and tossed his anchor in front of every village, hamlet or lone pigeon that appeared along the coast. He picked up a cow in one town and dropped it off at the next; in another he unloaded a bale of forage and in return loaded six or seven baskets of scallops, clams, crabs, barnacles and squid; in the neighboring hamlet he brought fabrics aboard which he later exchanged for cereal. Jonas, who before reaching Noia had only seen the sea (in passing) the day that we had hurriedly left Joanot and Gerard in the port of Barcelona, happily joined in with the ship’s crew, bursting with energy and enthusiasm, performing hard tasks that put his muscles to the test and left him exhausted but satisfied. Two days before disembarking, after dinner, he came over to Sara and myself as we were talking quietly, leaning on the side of the ship, and blurted out, “I want to be a sailor.”

“I was afraid of that,” I said, slapping my forehead without turning around.

Sara laughed and Jonas looked deeply upset.

“But not now!” he shouted angrily. “When we finish this strange journey!”

“Thank goodness …! I feel so much more relieved,” I muttered, barely able to contain my laughter.

I had never felt so happy, had never felt so rich and powerful, had never had everything that I wanted in the world all at once. The new Galceran was a lucky man, even though he still had to walk straight into the dragon’s den.

“Do you know something?” whispered Sara when Jonas had disappeared, very offended, into the shadows of the boat.

“What?”

“I’m tired of this ‘strange journey’ as Jonas so rightly calls it. I want us to stop now, I want us to find a place to live and buy a house where we will always be together, you and me. We have a lot of money! We still have four bags of gold left over from what we were given in Portomarin. We could buy a farm,” she said, lost in her thoughts, “and lots of animals.”

“Stop dreaming, Sara,” I said sadly. I would have liked to have held her and kissed her right then. I would have liked to have made love to her right there. “We can’t allow ourselves to dream yet. In two days, if everything goes well, we will put an end to this ‘strange journey’. But we still don’t know what’s going to happen, Sara, we don’t know what will become of us, we can’t even be sure that we won’t have to carrying on running.”

She looked at me with sadness in her eyes.

“I don’t think it’s worth living a life where we always have to be hiding, escaping, lying and concealing ourselves from the world.”

There was nothing I could say. I couldn’t tell her that if things went badly in Finisterre that was the best future we could hope for. I don’t want our future to be like that either. Who would wish for a life like that?

“Listen carefully, Sara,” I said, containing my affliction and moving on to tell her some important details. “This is what I want you and Jonas to do ….”

Very early the next day, the ship anchored in front of Corcubion, at the entrance to the river past the islands of Lobeira and Carromoeiro, and remained bobbing in the tide of those cold, transparent waters with turquoise reflections. From what I could see from the harbor, which was crowded with big fishing boats, Corcubion seemed to be a rich, prosperous town, with large and stately stone mansions whose windows shone in the sun like mercury and silver.

“This afternoon we will reach the Fin de Mundo,” said Martiño with satisfaction, “Fisterra,” and he began to sing under his breath: “O que vai a Compostela … fai ou non fai romaría … se chega ou non a Fis-terra ….”

“I have a proposal for you, Martiño,” I said quietly, interrupting his song.

“What is it?” he asked.

“How much would you want to make a small change to your route?”

“A small change to my route? What change?”

“I need you to moor your boat here, in Corcubion, and later, at midnight, take us to Finisterre, but not to the port, to the cape itself. You leave me on land and you stay at sea, keeping a prudent distance from where I can see you and, from that time on you obey my sons’ orders who will tell you when you should return to land to collect me or drop them off, or if you should take them to wherever they tell you and leave me behind.”

Martiño looked very thoughtful, biting his bottom lip. He was a man of about twenty-five or twenty-six, tanned, burly and willful, and you could tell a mile off that thinking was not his thing, that he had enough on his plate splendidly steering his ship along the coast. However, he was also a skilled trader, and I hoped that he would not pass up a good opportunity. If he refused, I would have to go ashore at Corcubion and find another boat.

“I don’t know,” he muttered. “How about one gold doubloon?”

“One doubloon!”

“O.K., O.K.! A hundred maravedis, just a hundred maravedis! But you need to keep in mind that the reefs off Cape Fisterra are the most dangerous in the world. It will be very difficult to get you there.”

I began to laugh.

“No, Martiño, one doubloon is fine! I’ll pay you one doubloon now and another when we are done. Will that suit you?”

Of course that suited him; he wouldn’t have been able to earn that sort of money doing even fifty of his tough voyages. But it was difficult enough trying to keep the boat safe in that rough sea, and what I was asking him to do — and I knew it —, was to perform a miracle: to hug the coastline of the sharp cliffs of the edge of the world, dodging the jagged rocks and reefs, and leaving me safely on shore shortly before sunrise. That was certainly worth two gold doubloons.

However, that night Martiño demonstrated his great navigating skills and his unwavering courage. A gust of wind almost blew us onto the Bufadoiro reef but he guided his ship with unsurpassed expertise and just before dawn the side of the boat brushed against the granite rocks of Cape Finisterre. After a small jump, I stepped foot on the edge of the world.

“Be careful, father,” said Jonas as the boat was pulling away.

I took a few steps forward and stopped to look around. There were no more paths to travel. I had arrived.

As I waited for the sun to rise and Manrique of Mendoza to arrive, I walked around and around that deserted peninsula, feeling the pained look that Sara had given me when I had left the boat deep in my heart like a dagger. Her black eyes had wanted to trap me, as if they suspected that it was the last time they would see me, and I would have loved to have taken her in my arms and given her millions of kisses and whisper in her ear how much I loved her and how much I needed her. I was there for her, walking along the crags of the end of the world, blue with cold, for her and for that lanky, gangly lad who had my voice and the temperament of a thousand devils. If they hadn’t existed, if they hadn’t been on board that small vessel that I could see rocking on the open sea just off the coast, I wouldn’t have been risking everything that morning which sadly didn’t have the best chances of going well.

I was armed, of course, but the thin dagger I had hidden at my chest, under my doublet, would be of no help at all if an armed retinue of Templars had have appeared on that deserted rock with the intention of ending my life. It wouldn’t have been in their best interests — which is what I was counting on —, and they obviously knew that, judging on the speed with which they had agreed to negotiate with me. Nevertheless, there was always the dangerous possibility that Mendoza was determined to deal with the problem quickly, trusting in moves that I had not anticipated or had not thought of through ignorance or bad judgment.

With increasing desperation I went back over the main points of my offer, thinking, as the hours passed by without Manrique making an appearance, that they were increasingly weak and inconsistent but I decided that that impression was just a product of fear at that time, and fear was the only feeling that I couldn’t let myself feel, as it turned me into the loser before the game had even begun.

Finally, when midday was approaching, after about the sixth hour, I could make out the figure of a man riding on a horse to the east. Despite the fact that the fog was low, so I couldn’t see him at first, there was no doubt in my mind that it was Manrique of Mendoza.

“I see that you got here first!” he shouted when he was closer. I was waiting for him, standing with my arms crossed over my chest in defiance.

“Did you doubt that I would?” I replied proudly.

“No. No I didn’t. You are a cautious man, Galceran of Born, and that is a good thing.”

He dismounted his horse and tied the reins to some bushes.

“Here we are again, old friend,” he said scrutinizing me, looking me up and down, like someone looking at a lackey to whom they should give approval. “Destiny has brought us together once again, isn’t that strange? I remember when Evrard and I returned from Cyprus sixteen years ago and we spent a few weeks at my father’s castle. There you were, still a boy, a young servant, head over heels in love with my stupid sister. Hahaha!”