Yiddish for Pirates(49)
“I am Fernández, yes, and cousin to that Sarah who you tried to help. I, too, have spoken with this would-be world-finder Columbus. I will travel with him, through the Pillars of Hercules, across Ocean Sea and beyond history’s vanishing point. With the Do?a gone, there are no more rescue ships. And, in truth, this dark tide has already washed my heart to sea, and only habit keeps blood moving through me.”
There was a great clattering in the courtyard.
Important people, or perhaps more correctly, the self-important, move either with preternatural silence or with profligate sound. I flew to the window. Bright colours. Hammered metal. Flourishes of cut-sleeved brocade. The landed had landed and they were coming toward us.
“Who is it?” I asked.
Fernández: “That’s a clever bird.”
A pageboy was on the steps of the chamber. Moishe ran to the door that he’d previously charted as a sally port for use in sudden storm.
It was locked.
I flew to the rafters. Birds and clouds can hide in the sky. Moishe would have to learn from the painter’s horizon and become background. He pressed himself against the wall, miming grout or shadow.
“Se?or Fernández, our queen arrives. She grants you time and her noble visage for the painting of her portrait,” the page said.
The painter rose in anticipation and soon the royal cortège bustled in. A couple songbird-resplendent maidels-in-waiting, some hildagos, many pages, two priests and Torquemada, Grand biltong-dry Inquisitor of the Holy Office, and the Queen: short, strong, blue-eyed, with hair like the auburn planks of a ship. She had the self-assurance of a statue of herself, though far beneath the staid mantel of steady piety there appeared to be a fiery and excitable core.
“Su Majestad Católica es muy generosa. Your Catholic Majesty is most generous,” Fernández said, bowing low, and with perhaps a slightly ironic curve to his painterly spine.
But it might have been artistic foreshortening.
The Queen acknowledged him with an almost imperceptible nod, then established court by enthroning the grand duchy of her regal tuches in the ornate chair. Once the seat of power was comfortable, she nodded to Torquemada who sat in a smaller chair beside her.
The pages stood against the wall beside Moishe. An invisible identification line-up. In these times, servants were deferential and soft-focus backgrounds to the prominent foreground of the powerful. It was unlikely the pages would break rank and render themselves visible by singling out Moishe, especially in the presence of the Queen. To be wrong might result in the singling out of their livers or tongues. At the very least, they would be expelled.
From a high window.
“Se?or Fernández, you may begin,” the Queen said, and struck a noble, world-conquering, Jew-tossing, Moor-expunging, yet humble pose.
The painter lifted his brush and palette. Soon the oval lake before him began to glow with an expression of inherited power. From amidst a shroud of mist, the face of Isabella appeared, a pious Ozymandias looking faithfully into the future.
Isabella kibitzed quietly with her ladies-in-waiting.
Torquemada, the wizened Millenarian vulture, perched on his chair silently, wondering where the Messiah was, waiting for the beginning of the end of the world, reclaiming Zion and positioning Ferdinand as “Last World Emperor.” I could almost see him drying out, his alter kaker apple-doll brain collapsing in on itself like a dead star, his fearsome eyes sucking all available light from the room.
The doppelganger Isabella continued to form.
The priests and hidalgos stood waiting.
Then Columbus strode into the doorway.
A sailor with seven-league bootstraps looking for Su Majestad’s permission to begin his long sail over the short sea.
He bowed but as if only to offer the Queen an exclusive vision of the pure snows that creamed the polar cap of his head.
“Se?or Columbus,” the Queen began. “Admiral of the distant horizon and Viceroy of what isn’t there. It is a surprise.”
“Su Majestad,” he said.
“Doubtless, you have come to speak again of savages and kings. So, enter and prophesy.” He walked into the room, a grand procession of one. There was a flicker of recognition as his eyes scanned the far wall—sailors look always to the edges of where they are—Moishe a familiar piss-pool in a lake of pages, though Columbus said nothing.
“Su Majestad, I will sail to Cathay and Cipangu,” he said. “To the lands of the Great Khan. ‘Most Serene Prince,’ I shall say to him, ‘I have travelled from where the morning begins, west from the east, and yet have arrived at the Farther East. I bring you greetings from your dearest friends, Los Reyes Católicos, Queen Isabella of Castile and King Ferdinand of Aragon.’ ”
He turned toward beef-jerky Torquemada. “And, Your Eminence,” he said, “I will discover how these people are disposed and the manner whereby their conversion to our holy faith might be effected. This I do for Our Lord, enthroned above the circle of our world and who wishes it so.”
He spoke again to the Queen. “Also,” he said, “I will return with an Ararat of gold, spices, rare treasures, and—before the African-groping Portuguese may grasp them—new conquests of islands and mainlands in the Ocean Sea. These will provide such monies as will allow our stalwart Christian soldiers to retake Jerusalem, even as you’ve returned the good lamb of Granada to your Majesties’ Catholic flock. It is but a small risk for great glory, both here and in the Eternal beyond.”