Reign of Madness (2 page)

The Spains

Possibly Isabel of Castile

1.

15 April anno Domini 1493

I
had gone to get Estrella. She was in my chamber on the second floor of the palace in Barcelona, chewing a slipper, no doubt. She was losing her puppy teeth, and I, the proud bearer of nearly fourteen entire years, believed with the confident certainty of a physician at Salamanca that her gums did pain her. I thought that my company would aid her. I would keep her in my sleeve, where she could burrow to her heart’s delight. She would not piss if the ceremony did not take too terribly long. Surely a reception for a sailor, even one who claimed to have found a shortcut to the Indies, would not last longer than a Mass. She had made it through many a Mass when I thought that even I should burst.

My chance to escape came when Mother was deep in one of her discussions with her confessor, Fray Hernando de Talavera. The two of them were roasting themselves before the fireplace, which in the Saló del Tinell was large enough to house a peasant family and their beasts. My mother was the Queen of Castile, León, Aragón, Granada, Naples, Sicily, Toledo, Valencia, Galicia, Mallorca, Seville, Sardinia, Corsica, Murcia, Jaén, the Algarve, Algeciras, and, let us not forget, Gibraltar, with its apes, one of whom tried to bite me when I gave it an orange. But Heaven was not yet one of the places she ruled, and so she listened to Fray Hernando with a reverence she afforded few men. Certainly not Papa.

Fray Hernando was leaning over her, his head tilted to hear her over the din around them, an affectionate smile upon his handsome smooth-skinned face, when my brother, Juan, and his household clattered into the hall. Most of Juan’s pimpled gallants had insisted on wearing their armor and, typical boys of fifteen years or so, were enjoying the pain they were inflicting on everyone’s ears with their clanking. All they earned from Mother was a twinge of a frown, but my little sisters María and Catalina gazed at them worshipfully, as if they might be knights from one of the tales of chivalry that María so loved to read. My elder sister, Isabel, however, was not amused. Widowed and worldly at twenty-two, she was Queen in her own mind, even though, as a woman, she was behind Juan in the succession.

But while Juan acted like a clown, at least he was clever enough to realize that not even he was likely ever to be King, not with Mother’s bear-grip on life. Good luck, Señor Death, trying to reel in Queen Isabel of Castile before she was ready. She had fought to win her crowns, battled the Moors to near extinction, and united the Spains, all the while wearing a man’s breastplate as she urged her men on, her wavy strawberry-gold hair blowing in the wind. The woman was too ferocious to die. And though the motto she took with Papa was
“Tanto monta, monta tanto, Isabel como Fernando”—
Isabel and Fernando, they amount to the same—it was her fierce will and not Papa’s quiet strength that was recognized as the force behind these wonders, as unjust as I thought that was. No, this was not a person who would lie down meekly to be collected by the Reaper. Perhaps this was why my sister Isabel took such pleasure in trying to dictate everyone’s actions. In her heart, she knew it was as close as she would ever come to ruling.

Now my sister was exchanging disapproving glares with her ladies. Their own furrowed brows were tepid imitations of hers—indeed, some of their glances at the boys were passing flirtatious.
Bueno
. Let everyone chat, flirt, worship, or clank. I could slip from the chamber to get Estrella.

I had not gotten far—only to the chapel of Santa Agata, which Mother had newly redone, like everything else in the Spains—when I thought I heard a woman laugh. I stopped to listen.

Behind me, from the other side of the iron-strapped door I had so carefully closed to the
saló
, came the muted music of Mother’s lutenists and the muffled din of the grandees, priests, and ladies waiting to receive Colón after his voyage. To the right of the
saló
, on the steps to the Plaça del Rei—those same steps on which a wretch had tried to take Papa’s life only five months earlier—I could hear the pikemen stationed just outside the palace door, banging their poles and stamping their feet against the chill of the drizzly April morning. Drums pounded in the distance: Colón’s procession. To judge from their sound, he had entered the walls of the city. In less time than it takes to sew on a button, I had to get Estrella in the far reaches of the palace, return, and melt back into the gathering, unnoticed.

But there—I heard it again. A soft titter, behind the heavy carved doors of the chapel, one of which was ajar.

I knew that laugh yet could not quite place it. And in Mother’s chapel? Who would be in there now? All of us and our households were to be in the Saló del Tinell: Mother’s orders.
She
believed Colón’s claim that he had found a better way to the Indies—at least to the outlying islands—so the rest of us must be there to receive him, no matter if some, like Papa, whose line in all things I staunchly followed, were not convinced.

I heard the rustle of heavy cloth from inside the chapel.

I glanced around guiltily. Colón’s drums were slowly nearing. My sister would note my absence at any minute and report it to Mother, bringing down both me and my former tutor, now governess, Beatriz Galindo, who was expected to keep control over me. But I had to see who was in there. Had one of Mother’s ladies disobeyed her? Or,
Hostias en vinagre,
had one of my sister’s? I would not want to be this person when Isabel found out. Even at my tender age I understood that a would-be monarch could be more tyrannical than a crowned one.

Carefully, as not to make the thick iron hinges creak, I put my shoulder to the door and leaned into the chapel.

Honey and orange peel. That’s what I smelled, not the oily scent of the incense from Mass or Mother’s musky perfume. Mother did love a good strong stink of civet. She dabbed a fortune of it on the nape of her neck each day. No, this was honey and orange, for certain. It was familiar to me, but how?

A woman murmured.

I followed the sound with my gaze to the portable prayer booth in which Mother was taken to Mass each day like a relic being carried to its shrine. The rustling came from inside the cloth-of-gold curtains. Whoever was inside was making the curtains sway.

I drew up short: There was a man in the booth. I could hear him breathe. Even a child knows whether it is a man or a woman by the sound of the person’s breath.

I heard the smack of moist flesh.
¡Hostias! Hostias!
There were two people in there. I knew what they were doing.

My heart pounding, I took a step back and crunched on something hard. I lifted my heel. A ruby the size of a hazelnut.

I scooped it up and ran out to get Estrella.

When I returned to the
saló
, the drums of Colón’s procession were rattling the timber floors of the chamber. He was entering the Plaça del Rei outside. Mother and Papa had taken to their thrones at the far end of the room; Papa was whispering in Mother’s ear. She did not seem to see me slip between my little sisters, but Beatriz did. She rounded her eyes at me in outraged disbelief. Beatriz Galindo was only five years older than I, and already famed for her skill in Latin, having attended university in Salerno. She had been a brilliant tutor, but she was a terrible governess and for that I loved her. I feared that Mother would catch on to how lax a prison guard she was and relieve her of her duties. A chill from almost being caught raised the hair on my arms.

I was still breathing hard from my run, when, to the blare of trumpets and the pounding of kettledrums, Colón entered the hall.

Though he had met with my parents several times before his voyage, this was the first that I had seen the sailor. He was tall like Mother, and big-boned. He had her red-gold hair, too, but his chin-length locks, limp and darkened from the drizzling rain, were liberally shot with pale gray. He had a strong hooked nose and thick proud-set lips, and though he swept off his velvet cap in deference, he held up his chin when he dropped to his knees before Mother. Perhaps she recognized something of her own proud self in him, and favored him for it, for she raised one corner of her mouth in a smile. Papa, however, buckled his dark brow at Colón’s arrogance. As with so many things, my parents’ opinions differed markedly, and we children were left to take sides. My lot, as ever, was with Papa. I frowned at the puffed-up mariner.

Mother let him kiss her hand, then Papa’s, then drew him up. “Cristóbal Colón, please show us what you have brought from the Indies. Come sit. Sit.”

The grandees glanced at one another as Mother beckoned for a page to bring a chair. None of them had ever been offered a seat in my mother’s presence. Nor, I realized at that moment, had I.

The crossed gilt legs of the chair groaned as Colón eased his large person onto the leather seat.

“Your Sacred Majesties Doña Isabel and Don Fernando, I thank you. With God’s great blessings, I have brought you all nature of wondrous things.” He clapped his hands. As the crowd murmured with approval, sailors dressed in red breeches and white shirts brought forth treasures: An open chest filled with nuggets of gold. Lengths of precious aromatic wood. Screeching green parrots in a silver cage. Exotic foods. One shriveled red fruit was so spicy that tears came to Mother’s eyes when she tasted it, though she liked the toasted seeds called
maiz
. How she laughed when a pair of long-legged rodents were led in on leashes.

Colón grinned at her delight. “
Hutias,
they are called
.
Very good to eat. They taste much like rabbit.”

Papa sat back as the hall stirred with increasing excitement. He was a listener, and a thinker, and, I thought then, the kindest person I knew. There was a reason he took the anvil as his personal emblem—you can strike it all day and it will remain silent and unbreakable. As much as Mother and others made of the perfection of their marriage, I did not think she appreciated him enough.
Tanto monta, monta tanto—
did it ever occur to her that he might be the stronger one?

“Did you bring back any other Eastern beasts?” Papa asked. “Marco Polo talked of monkeys, tigers, elephants. I don’t recall any tales of edible rats.”

“In truth,” said Colón, “they are more like rabbits.”

Papa studied him calmly. “Perhaps these rats were too unimportant for him to mention.”

The smile faded from Colón’s heavy lips. He gazed at Papa as if judging him anew. “Your Sacred Majesty, in the lands I claimed for you and Her Sacred Majesty the Queen, there were plenty of monkeys—a very loud type, as a matter of fact. I would not wish for their howling to disturb your peace.”

Papa looked unmoved. “You are most thoughtful, Colón. Perhaps these, these—what did you call these rats?”

“Hutias.”

“—these
hutias
came from the City of Gold that Marco Polo referred to. Perhaps they are known to the Great Khan of Cathay.”

“Perhaps,” Colón said warily. “I have not had the privilege of meeting him yet, as I have already written in my letter to you. I did not linger in the Indies, for I wished to hurry home as quickly as possible to share the good news with Your Sacred Majesties. However, I was able to bring you these.” He nodded at a sailor standing at the door.

The sailor disappeared for a moment. When he reappeared, everyone fell silent. Six wildmen, naked save for red breeches, edged into the chamber at the point of their captors’ pikes. They each had a gold ring in their nose, fish bones bristling from their earlobes, and dull brown hair, as long as a girl’s but stiff, atop which feathers were fixed. Colón’s men held tightly to the chains that bound them as they crept forward, now lurching, now crying out, now staring wide-eyed at the crowd gaping back at them.

“Judas’s soul!” My brother Juan peered at the men crouched shakily before him. “What are they?” Armor clinking, he reached out to one of them in wonder.

The creature flinched, then shouted at him in a foreign tongue.

The nobles, the ladies, Juan’s boys, even the musicians, went rigid. Colón swelled up as if he would have liked to leap from his chair to murder the beast. This savage had shown disrespect to the heir of the crowns of the Spains. With held breath, everyone looked to Mother.

She gazed thoughtfully upon the wildman, who now cowered as though he knew he’d done wrong. “So.” She tapped her finger against her lips. “These are my new subjects.”

The hush in the chamber rose like a loaf of resting dough.

Slowly, she brought her hands together in applause. “Bravo, Cristóbal Colón, bravo.”

Papa pulled his glance from something in the crowd, then clapped along with her. “Yes. Bravo.”

His enthusiasm rekindled by relief, Colón animatedly described how he had found the strange men on what must be an outer island of China—perhaps near the famed isle of Cipangu. These were Chinamen or Cipangos or some such persons of the Far East. Men of the Indies, or “Indios,” he called them.

“The land is populated with thousands more, just like these,” Colón said.

“Are they cannibals?” asked my brother.

“In spite of their rough appearance,” said Colón, “no. These men don’t eat human flesh. Indeed, you have never seen a more gentle, childlike people. They are affectionate and without covetousness. They love their neighbors as themselves.”

Yet they were chained as if dangerous. I did not understand. Only enemies of Mother or the Church were treated in such a way, like the Moors after Mother’s defeat of Málaga. When I was seven, most of the population of that town—men, women, and children—had been put into chains for defying her. She had said that it was necessary, that they hated her, and the Church, and even me, and were threats to our security. When I asked her if even the children hated me, she sent me to Fray Hernando to be instructed, though it did me little good. Fray Hernando, with his warm brown eyes and smooth skin, had been so handsome and kind that I could not bear to look at him, let alone hear a word he uttered.