1492 - Mary Johnston (best novels to read in english txt) 📗

de Arana began to fail. The ship’s master came at supper time and looked us over. “Is there any here who has any leechcraft?”

Beltran the cook said, “I can set a bone and wash a wound; but it ends there!”

Cried Fernando from his corner. “Is the plague among us!” The master turned on him. “Here and now, I say five lashes for the man who says that word again! Has any man here sense about a plain fever?”

None else speaking, I said that long ago I had studied for a time with a leech, and that I was somewhat used to care of the sick. “Then you are my man!” quoth the master, and forthwith took me to the Admiral. I became Juan Lepe, the physician.

It was, I held, a fever received while wandering through the ravines and woods of Gomera. Master Bernardo had in his cabin drugs and tinctures, and we breathed now all the salt of Ocean-Sea, and the ship was clean. I talked to Beltran the cook about diet, and I chose Sancho and a man that I liked, one Luis Torres, for nurses. Two others sickened this night, and one the next day, but none afterward. None died; in ten days all were recovered. Other ailments aboard I doctored also. Don Diego de Arana was subject to fits of melancholy with twitchings of the body. I had watched Isaac the Physician cure such things as this, and now I followed instruction. I put my hands upon the patient and I strengthened his will with mine, sending into him desire for health and perception of health. His inner man caught tune. The melancholy left him and did not return. Master Bernardo threw off the fever, sat up and moved about. But he was still weak, and still I tended the others for him.

The Pinta had signaled four men ill. But Garcia Fernandez, the Palos physician, was there with Martin Pinzon, and the sick recovered. The Nina had no doctor and now she came near to the Santa Maria and sent a boat. She had five sick men and would borrow Bernardo Nunez.

The Admiral spoke with Nunez, now nearly well. Then the physician made a bundle of drugs and medicaments, said farewell to all and kindly enough to me, and rowed away to the Nina. He was a friend of the Pinzons, and above the vanity of the greater ship. The sick upon the Nina prospered under him.

But Juan Lepe was taken from the forecastle, and slept where Nunez had slept, and had his place at the table in the great cabin. He turned from the sailor Juan Lepe to the physician Juan Lepe, becoming “Doctor” and “Senor.” The wheel turns and a man’s past makes his present.

A few days from Gomera, an hour after sunset, the night was torn by the hugest, flaming, falling star that any of us had ever seen. The mass drove down the lower skirt of the sky, leaving behind it a wake of fire. It plunged into the sea. There is no sailor but knows shooting stars. But this was a hugely great one, and Ocean-Sea very lonely, and to most there our errand a spectral and frightening one. It needed both the Admiral and Fray Ignatio to quell the panic.

The next day a great bird like a crane passed over the Santa Maria. It came from Africa, behind us. But it spoke of land, and the sailors gazed wistfully.

This day I entered the great cabin when none was there but the Admiral, and again he sat at table with his charts and his books. He asked of the sick and I answered. Again he sat looking through open door and window at blue water, a great figure of a man with a great head and face and early-silvered hair. “Do you know aught,” he asked, “of astrology?”

I answered that I knew a little of the surface of it.

“I have a sense,” he said, “that our stars are akin, yours and mine. I felt it the day Granada fell, and I felt it on Cordova road, and again that day below La Rabida when we turned the corner and the bells rang and you stood beside the vineyard wall. Should I not have learned in more than fifty years to know a man? The stars are akin that will endure for vision’s sake.”

I said, “I believe that, my Admiral.”

He sat in silence for a moment, then drew the log between us and turned several pages so that I might see the reckoning. “We have come well,” I said. “Yet with so fair a wind, I should have thought—”

He turned the leaves till he rested at one covered with other figures. “Here it is as it truly is, and where we truly are! We have oversailed all that the first show, and so many leagues besides.”

“Two records, true and untrue! Why do you do it so?”

“I have told them that after seven hundred leagues we should find land. Add fifty more for our general imperfection. But it may be wider than I think. We may not come even to some fringing island in eight hundred leagues, no, nor in more than that! If it be a thousand, if it be two thousand, on I go! But after the seven hundred is passed, it will be hard to keep them in hand. So, though we are covering more, I let them think we are covering only this.”

I could but laugh. Two reckonings! After all, he was not Italian for nothing!

“The master knows,” he said, “and also Diego de Arana. But at least one other should know. Two might drown or perish from sickness. I myself might fall sick and die, though I will not believe it!” He paused a moment, then said, looking directly at me, “I need one in whom I can utterly confide. I should have had with me my brother Bartholomew. But he is in England. A man going to seek a Crown jewel for all men should have with him son or brother. Diego de Arana is a kinsman of one whom I love, and he partly believes. But Roderigo Sanchez and the others believe hardly at all. There is Fray Ignatio. He believes, and I confess my sins to him. But he thinks only of penitents, and this matter needs mind, not heart alone. Because of that sense of the stars, I tell you these things.”

The next day it came to me that in that Journal which he meant to make like Caesar’s Commentaries, he might put down the change in the Santa Maria’s physicians and set my name there too often. I watched my chance and finding it, asked that he name me not in that book. His gray eyes rested upon me; he demanded the reason for that. I said that in Spain I was in danger, and that Juan Lepe was not my name. More than that I did not wish to say, and perchance it were wiser for him not to know. But I would not that the powerful should mark me in his Journal or elsewhere!

Usually his eyes were wide and filled with light as though it were sent into them from the vast lands that he continuously saw. But he could be immediate captain and commander of things and of men, and when that was so, the light drew into a point, and he became eagle that sees through the wave the fish. Had he been the seer alone, truly he might have been the seer of what was to be discovered and might have set others upon the path. But he would not have sailed on the Santa Maria!

In his many years at sea he must many times have met men who had put to sea out of fear of land. He would have sailed with many whose names, he knew, were not those given them at birth. He must have learned to take reasons for granted and to go on—where he wished to go on. So we gazed at each other.

“I had written down,” he said, “that you greatly helped the sick, and upon Bernardo Nunez’s going to the Nina, became our physician. But I will write no more of you, and that written will pass in the flood of things to come.” After a moment, he ended with deliberation, “I know my star to be a great star, burning long and now with a mounting flame. If yours is in any wise its kin, then there needs must be histories.”