VOYAGE OF STRANGERS (17 page)

“What can I do for you, my friend?” I asked. My eyes stung, and I had to force the words past a lump in my throat.

“Tell my son,” he gasped, “tell Hutia he must be a brother to you and the little one. Tell him he is Taino and I am proud of him.”

“I will miss you, my father,” Rachel said in Taino. She kissed his forehead gently.

He touched her cheek, his hand trembling with the effort to raise it as she bent over him.

“My soul will fly tonight and seek to feed. If it cannot reach the shore and find the
guayaba
, I will come to your little lemon tree tonight. Look for me.”

“I will, my father.”

His head fell back, the death rattle rose in his throat, and he lay still.

The fleet made no attempt to land until the evening, passing through still channels past several islands. Then the Admiral ordered all ships to drop anchor on the lee side of a flat island he named Mariagalante for our flagship. He took a party ashore to plant the royal standard and raise a cross. Against my advice, Rachel had requested that we be allowed to bury Cristobal on shore. As I expected, with all that must be done to make this first landing a success, the Admiral had no time or thought to spare for such a request. Diego Columbus said loudly that the Taino had no prohibition against burial at sea. I knew this for a lie, but it would have been foolish to debate it once the Admiral had ordered it done.

So Cristobal went overboard, wrapped in a sail, and Rachel refused the opportunity to set foot ashore, as she meant to wait for Cristobal’s soul to come as a bat to the little lemon tree. The sapling, which had been in bloom when we acquired it and delighted Rachel by setting tiny green lemons during the voyage, had spent the day tucked out of the way on deck near the bow, where it would not be mishandled during the commotion of landfall.

“Do you wish me to wait with you?” I asked. From the stubborn set of her jaw, I deemed it useless to point out that the chances of a bat making its way to the ship were small, whether it was in truth the Taino’s soul or an ordinary fruit bat.

“No,” Rachel said, “you need not hold back on my account. You must be eager to set foot on land. Unless you wish to avoid having to help raise the cross?”

“I can join the party that will go in search of dry wood and fresh water,” I said. “I will come to you as soon as I return.”

I found her when we boarded the ship again near midnight, crouched in the bow and sobbing. The little lemon tree was gone. Although we could not prove it, both of us believed that Diego Columbus had thrown it overboard.

Chapter Twenty-Two

Dominica – Guadalupe - Santa Cruz, November 4-13, 1493

Once having set foot on shore, all were eager to reach La Navidad. We longed to know what progress had been made there toward a colony and, more urgent, the finding of gold. Even I, who had reason to dread the reunion with our former shipmates, felt my pulse quicken at the prospect of beholding the fabled mine of Cibao. The Taino of Hispaniola all assured us it lay in the nearby mountains, but its location had still been hidden when we left the year before. There would be riches enough for all if they had found it.

We did not linger on Dominica or its neighboring isles, although the Admiral named each one and sent a party ashore to set up the royal flag and claim it for the Crown. This he continued as we passed island after island, many mountainous with densely forested slopes, all set like jewels in seas of astonishing colors. These ran from palest aqua, in which fish painted like gypsy wagons in green, yellow, orange, red, and black darted to and fro, to the dark turquoise of the deeper waters between the isles.

On one island, which the Admiral named Santa Maria de Guadalupe, we stayed almost a week. This was not by design, though the island was one of the most beautiful we saw. Approaching it from a distance, we were greeted by a marvel, a waterfall that fell from the clouds down the slopes of the highest peak. This island was populated. The party of ten men that the Admiral sent to investigate the interior became lost in the forest. Four search parties, numbering altogether two hundred men, were sent after them but
failed to find them. Instead, they were guided back to the shore by twenty Taino who had been captives of the Caribe. The Taino, grateful for their rescue, swore that their captors ate human flesh. Remembering my friend Hutia’s words on the subject, I was skeptical. If   their accusation was meant to arouse our sympathy and pity, this strategy succeeded with the Admiral, who ever afterward considered the Caribe to be foul and wicked. However, his admiration for the Taino did not prevent him from enslaving them.

Leaving Guadalupe behind, we bore northwest toward Hispaniola, passing more than half a dozen isles of varying size and terrain. The greatest of these was not only populated, but well cultivated, for we could see the mounds on which the Taino planted
yuca
and rows of the spiky topknots of the plants whose heavy fruit, brown and prickly without but golden green within and sweet with juice, the Taino called
yayama
. We sailed as close to the lee shore as we could, seeking a harbor. Finally we anchored at the mouth of an estuary whose waters the Admiral believed must be sweet further inland. According to his custom, he declared that henceforth the island would be known as Santa Cruz. He sent an armed party of twenty-five up the river in one of our boats.

I can report but not explain what happened next. On the first voyage, the Indians we met had greeted us with joy and been eager to press gifts upon us. That these didn’t might be attributed, as the Admiral believed, to the fact that they were Caribe, our enemies and not our friends. Or it may be that our reputation had gone before us, and the small group of four men, two women, and a boy who came upon our party suddenly as they paddled their dugout
canoa
believed that if they didn’t fight, they would be carried off. They had reason to believe this, even if they had not heard of the men with metal weapons in their winged boats, for our ship’s boat moved to block their escape as they still stared, surprised and uncertain of what to do.

Seeing they could not flee, they prepared to fight. For why else should our men have prevented them save to attack them? Battle was joined. Since the Caribe had only bows and arrows to counter the Spanish swords and muskets, the outcome was a foregone conclusion. Rachel, watching beside me from the deck, caught her breath as they carried to the ship an Indian who had been wounded in the gut. Biting her lip, she refused to turn away as they laid him on the deck, bloody intestines spilling out of his belly in a slimy tangle. Dr. Chanca bent over him and shook his head.

“This one will not live to make a slave,” he said.

Rachel cried out in horror as two sailors seized him by his arms and legs, swung him back and forth to gain momentum, and heaved him overboard. But worse was to come. The wounded Carib, clutching his belly with one hand, dog-paddled with the other toward shore. The Taino captives whom we had already taken crowded to the rail to watch, Diego Columbus beside them.

“They say we must kill him,” the interpreter said. “If not, he will bring a host of Caribe down on us.”

Rachel clutched the rail so hard her knuckles turned white.

“That is not what they said,” she said between gritted teeth.

“I know,” I said softly, for though not as adept at languages as Rachel, I too had learned much from Cristobal. “But we can do nothing. Close your eyes if you cannot bear to look.”

But Rachel watched steadily as some of the shore party recaptured the gutshot Carib and tossed him back on board. Close to fainting with pain and loss of blood, the man was trussed securely with rope and thrown back into the sea.

“If he can endure it, I can watch it,” she said.

I longed to put my arm around her, but although none of the crowd around us was paying us any attention, I could not so use the Admiral’s page boy.

“There is more than one kind of
auto da fe
,” I murmured.

There was a great shout from the shore, and from the woods a host of Caribe came running, shaking spears and launching arrows toward the ships, for the shore party’s boat, having rammed and sunk the Carib canoe and killed or captured all aboard it, had speedily returned to the safety of deeper water. The Caribe, painted for battle in red, white, and ochre and screaming with rage and frustration, could not reach us. Our better armed men, however, could wound and make captives of those who swam out to the ship. Diego Columbus declared that these were Taino slaves who preferred us to the flesh-eating Caribe. If so, they were doomed to regret their choice.

Among the gentleman volunteers was a childhood friend of the Admiral’s, Michele de Cuneo of Savona. He had sailed with us aboard Mariagalante, a big-headed, boisterous fellow much given to boasting and coarse remarks. He had been in the thick of the battle, bellowing as he swung his sword, even laughing, as if killing itself were a joy. He returned to the ship with a screaming naked maiden under his arm, kicking and squirming this way and that in her efforts to get free. He paid no attention until she managed to scratch his face and attempted to bite his arm. Then he swatted her on her bare buttocks with the flat of his still bloody sword, which made her scream louder than ever.

Cuneo looked up, laughing, at the Admiral, who stood above the fray where he could survey the battle in its entirety.

“Eh! Colombo!” he called, surely the only man who dared to address him thus. “Can I keep this one for myself?”

I heard Rachel’s sharp intake of breath as the Admiral nodded, raising his hand in assent and quirking one side of his mouth in a brief smile.

“Do you hear that, girl?” Cuneo cried, though of course she could not understand him. “You belong to me now, and I shall use you as I please.”

He tossed his sword to one of the ship’s boys who happened to pass at that moment, ordering, “Clean it!” Then he got a better grip on the girl by seizing a handful of her hair, which made her cry out in pain, and thrusting his arm between her legs from behind so he could bunch the flesh of her naked belly in his fist. Her cries rose to a scream as he carried her below, for Mariagalante was so spacious that the gentlemen volunteers had their own cabin, albeit a crowded one if all of them had ever occupied it at the same time.

Much of the noise on deck died away as the rest of the captives were subdued and the Caribe on the shore fled. The order came to weigh anchor. The sailors on watch leaped to their tasks. The gromets, with bucket and scrubbing brush, began to clean the deck of blood and other detritus of the battle. I remained with Rachel. We could hear the screams continue from below. The rhythmic slap of a whip or, more likely, a length of rope on bare flesh punctuated the girl’s cries.

“Diego!” Rachel cried. “What is he doing to her?”

I took her hand and pulled her down beside me on a coil of rope.

“Do you know what is meant to happen between a man and a woman?”

“Yes,” she said. “Elvira told me.”

“What did she tell you?” I asked. Our eldest sister loved to hoard information and spring it on us at the moment when it would most devastate or embarrass us, and she did not always pause to verify her facts.

“She said a man and a woman do the same as when a bull is set to a cow, so she will bear a calf and furnish milk. And that is how human folk make a baby.”

“And what do you think of that?” I asked. I expected her to say that she found it hard to believe of our parents, who both had a full measure of dignity.

“I know it is true,” she said, “for I asked Mama. She said there is pleasure in it too, when it is done correctly.”

Papa had said the same. I would not admit to Rachel that I had had no opportunity yet to investigate the matter for myself. So I simply nodded, hoping my little sister thought me wiser than I was.

“Mama told me about rape too,” Rachel said. “That is what Cuneo is doing, is it not?”

“Yes, but—Mama told you?”

“She knew it was a danger, sending me to Barcelona when things were getting worse,” Rachel said, “and none knew what the King and Queen would do about the Jews. She said I must have this knowledge so that if I were taken, at least I would not be taken by surprise.”

At that moment a series of piercing screams came from below. Cuneo would not heed the Taino girl’s plea for mercy. But Rachel and I both understood. She begged for freedom, threatened to kill him if he did not stop, then cried hopelessly for her mother.

“I can't imagine,” Rachel said, her voice trembling, “how it could be worse than the burning. But I didn’t know that beating was a part of it.”

“It need not be,” I said, setting my teeth against both the girl’s screams and the thought of anyone using Rachel so, “if the woman is chained in the Inquisition’s dungeons, with no one to hear her cries.”

“Cuneo is a beast!” Rachel said.

“He is, but few of our shipmates would agree with us.”

As if to prove me right, a burst of lewd remarks and cheers greeted Cuneo as he appeared on deck. He wiped at a thin line of blood trickling down his cheek where the desperate girl’s nails had found their mark.

“The
puta
is shameless,” he said, grinning as he adjusted his breeches. “Once I had thrashed her well, she served me as if she had been brought up in a school for harlots.”