The Fabulous Beast (7 page)

~

Today the heavy air lifted! We woke this morning to a great swell which rocked our raft this way and that, but the surface itself was much less the dancing water than that which we have endured over the last two days. Our spirits were lifted and we began the day thanking God for breathing the breath of Heaven over our flotilla. Anxious to make progress Amerigo called for us to step from our rafts and take up the ribbons again, which most of us did with alacrity. Some will always complain and dispute with authority, for that is the nature of men, but when these rebels saw their fellows begin to haul they soon felt the prickings of pride and walked out to take up the traces before we pulled too far ahead. We had a fair day of it, with light winds and a few short periods of sunshine. It is amazing how the sun may fill a man’s soul with hope.

The going was not easy, we having to haul the rafts up the slopes of waves the size of Rome’s hills. But for every up there is a down and just when we thought our lungs would split with the effort we found ourselves treading down into watery-green valleys smooth as glass. It was in one such valley that some wild dolphins came and investigated our expedition. They leapt from the water, crying gleefully, wanting play. There were dolphin-imitators amongst us who confused the poor creatures by repeating their calls and even countering them. Some claim that dolphins have a language which can be learned, but while I feel these sea animals might communicate between themselves I have doubts that any human can converse with them in any meaningful way. The tame dolphins can be called to their corrals at night, even be given instructions – a series of commands – but conversation is a much higher skill.

Today too, sadly, we lost our first comrade. A zealous marine soldier was striding out in front. In his eagerness to be seen to be doing his duty he failed to notice a dark patch on the ocean. This was no subsea monster, nor anything like, but a huge clotted mass of seaweed floating just below the surface. It became entangled around the poor man’s ankles as he strove to navigate this hidden snare.

A faltered step, a terror-filled moment when he realised he was going down, and then the fall. A gasping choking cry for help, a frantic thrashing of the surface, before the greenery which indeed seemed a living thing enfolded his flailing arms. We saw him struggling with his green trap, unable to reach him. By the time safety ropes were thrown only his head showed above the sea. He seemed unable to lift his hands, the weed perhaps being too heavy for them to penetrate. Then with a last despairing cry he was gone, disappearing beneath the water, most likely entangled forever. We could not even recover the body. None dared traverse the deadly vegetable. The marine was left to float within the enfolding vines, going where the currents took him and his creeper grave.

Such innocent-seeming perils there are out on the open waters of the world, waiting to entrap unwary walkers. There would be more to follow, we had little doubt. Valour was needed, courage required. At such times we promised one another that we would be vigilant in the protection of our comrades, secretly knowing that no matter how strong the watch there would always be that unseen danger which would manifest itself.

It is foreseen that we will have at least two months on this desert of water. Those mathematicians, using facts concerning the cycles of planets and stars; and calculating the distance travelled by winds, their strengths and direction; and informed by currents and swells on the ocean, say that our goal is at least 2,000 miles from the Irish shore.

We walk at 3 miles an hour for 8 hours a day. By this means we understand it will take us two months to cross these watery wastes and reach the Indies. Much of this journey will be drudgery. Some of it will be delightful. A little – a very little we hope – will be fraught with danger. Would that we had wings and could fly such a journey! Today I saw a shearwater skimming the surface of the sea. The first bird I have noted since we left the waders and gulls of Ireland.

~

‘There are murmurs of discontent,’ stated Greta. ‘Some speak of mutiny.’

We were sitting on the raft during one of today’s halts. Our voices, by necessity, were low though we were not planning conspiracy: others were doing that. There was the smell of fear in the air, which often engenders talk of desertion and even mutiny. The Devil plays havoc with fearful minds. Once people become afraid of something the first thing they think of is running away from it, though where they would run to out here on the open waters is a mystery to me. This is the worst kind of fear though: fear of the unknown. On the one hand we might be getting close to our destination, and so fear the beasts and people of that as yet unvisited place. On the other hand, we might
not
be nearing our goal, which would mean a slow death out here in the midst of the ocean. We have been out a month and a half now. There is no turning back. We have not the resources or the strength to return to our starting point.

‘What are you three whispering about?’

I looked up. An officer of our raft was standing over us. His hand was on the hilt of his sword. Greta stared at him.

‘Nothing,’ she said.

‘There’ll be no insurrection on
my
raft,’ stated the officer. His face was dripping with salt-spray. ‘I’ll kill the first man or woman who tries to stir up trouble.’

I said, ‘No one here was speaking against the expedition.’

‘Then speak so all can hear you,’ replied the officer. ‘He turned to the other raft-pullers. ‘That goes for everyone.’

All was quiet for a moment, then Giseppi filled his lungs and began shouting, ‘The weather today is quite pleasant for a stroll upon the waters of the Atlantic. What say you, my friend?’

I replied with the same volume that indeed I thought it was.

Men and women about us grinned. They too began dialogues at the tops of their voices, until the whole raft was instantly awash with noise. No one could hear themselves think above the racket. The officer who had given the order looked about him in a great rage. He wanted to punish someone but all were equally guilty of taking him at his word. He had asked for loud conversations and he was getting them. The raft commander finally intervened by ordering his marines to fire their muskets in the air. Only gradually we fell into a state of quietude.

The problem of the mutiny remained though and the following day a woman was executed, run though by Amerigo’s right hand man, Cato. Some say she was innocent of mutiny and that Cato made an example of her to show the real but unidentified plotters what would happen to them if they rose up against their officers. That she was a sickly soul with but a few days to live anyway confirmed this view.

Disquiet remained however. A giant marine beast of a shark dragged a man screaming to his death while he slept one night, his left foot overhanging the raft. There was a great storm somewhere to the north, which seemed to be bearing down us, though it never seemed to quite reach us. Greta talked incessantly about the horrors of the trenches of the ocean below us. She was convinced that the further we drew away from our own lands, the deeper became the waters beneath us. Our grip on the solid world, she stated, lessened with every step we took.

Then there was Giseppi. Giseppi had never been thoroughly convinced that the world was a ball: fears that the Earth was indeed flat still haunted him in many moments of doubt. His anxious eyes were always on the horizon, wondering if he would be the first to see the roaring waterfalls going over the edge of the world. If he were right, he said, we would all be swept to oblivion by impossible currents. In our imaginations we saw ourselves flung out by foaming waters, into the darknesses of an immense void, all hope lost of our wretched souls reaching Heaven.

~

Two months and two weeks have passed. Even our leader Amerigo himself must now realise we are doomed. Strabo’s calculations have been tossed to the winds. They were false. We should have reached the shores of the Indies long before now. The land-smellers tell us they have nothing but the whiff of salt-water in their nostrils. The sea itself is a colour we have never seen before: dark and brooding. A running sea that cuts this way and that, the currents and tides erratic in the extreme. No islands have been sighted. The last of the livestock was slaughtered two weeks ago. All that is left is the seed with which we hoped to trade. I have been eating flower bulbs as if they were onions, intent on quelling this bubbling hunger that wells up inside me. They make me sick.

A woman raft-puller died today when wild sea birds assailed her and she lost control of her walking pace. Her hands waved and fluttered around her head, as she tried to drive the creatures from her. Some say the birds were after the seeds caught in her clothing. I watched her sink slowly into the sea. Perhaps there was a trace of relief in her expression that her suffering was now over, yet there were also desperation and fear in her shouts. And anger. Anger at the people who had led her to this wet grave, anger at the birds for their unprovoked attacks, and finally anger at God’s ocean for robbing her of her life. Personally I believe it is very dangerous to rail at deities while on the point of death: last minute decisions on the soul’s destination I am sure can be swayed by such displays of emotion. A good person is a good person, and bad bad, but most of us are a mixture of both. Final gestures will tip scales.

Perhaps that is why we were visited by a violent storm later in the day? Because of the drowning raft-pullers curses? It began at dusk. The sea and sky darkened together so that the line we call horizon could no longer be perceived. It was all one, ocean and Heaven, with no division between them. Truly at this point I believed us to be in Hell. We all got to the rafts in time, and linked them together with a network of ropes to prevent separation. Shortly afterwards the tempest fell on us like a deranged wild beast. It tore at our clothes and the shelters, trying to wrench them from us. Waves rose around us as giants, tower over our puny rafts and crashing down upon them with a force which might shatter a stone building. Men and women were washed overboard and only the trailing safety ropes prevented more deaths than there were.

Above us the blackcloud reaches of the sky emitted a thousand jagged spears of lightning, minute after minute, unrelenting, which with each flash briefly lit our terror-filled eyes. Thunder crashed so loudly that it deafened us with its Heavenly reports. Winds howled. Rain came driving down like nails upon our backs and faces. We were lashed by whips of water as thick as hauling ropes, leaving red weals on our skin. Fish fell out of the sky and lay gasping on the boards. In this celestial violence it was difficult to tell up from down, left from right, centre from edge. The sea and sky were all one: white water, gushing and foaming around us; grey spray-filled air swirling about our heads; dark sky or dark ocean. The very earth below groaned with the weight of the frenzied water and sky which were locked in battle over it.

The very plates which separate Heaven and Hell were grinding together, and we poor mortals between them, pressed and buffeted by forces of nature beyond control of God or Man. Such a fierceness in the wind there were those who believed this was punishment for straying too far from Man’s place on the planet, or for travelling too near to the edge of the world. There were plots to kill Amerigo Vespucci which might have reached fruition if we were not in the Devil’s cauldron, all our efforts and attentions applied to clinging to our flimsy rafts. Men and women were swept away one after the other, their grey faces screwed into expressions of utter terror, their bodies lost to the giant seas. We cried mercy for our souls and called down damnation on Amerigo and his officers.

Then came the blessed break in the clouds. A chink at first, which widened to hole. God had poked his finger through the sky! Gradually the wind died, the seas grew calmer and the lightning and thunder which had raged above our heads travelled away to the horizon. We were drained of all energy. We lay on the decks of the rafts gasping like the stranded fish around us, weak beyond measure. Amerigo immediately addressed us, calling us brave and loyal men and women. We had undergone, he said, torments that would have destroyed any other expedition but ours, which he was convinced was sanctioned by God Himself. During the storm, we were told, God had spoken to Amerigo’s priest, Petrucio de la Roma, and told him we were the chosen few whose feet would cross the wide waters of the Atlantic and find safe haven on the far side.

We cheered him, great man that he is.

The rewards, Amerigo went on to tell us, would be inestimable. Our bounty would be the riches of the orient: nutmeg, rhubarb, porcelain, silver, silk, et al. Amerigo moreover promised us that if we did not touch land within three days we would turn back, though warned that we were so far from our homeland we would never survive the return journey. We cheered him again, then gathered up the freshly-dead fish from the decks and fried them, feasting for the first time in weeks. There was fresh water too, from the rain barrels, which we drank in contentment. The best wine could not have tasted so good as that cool clear rainwater.

~

Not three days, but two weeks later we sighted land. Half our original number now, we screamed in delight. We had finally reached the East Indies by walking across the Atlantic Ocean. Palm laden beaches were there, and good solid hills. It was a lush green mysterious land that presented itself to us and we could not wait to step off the waves and onto the strand. New fears entered our hearts: fear of unknown people, fear of unknown places. But alongside that was jubilance and gladness. Joy at our triumph. We slapped each other’s backs and praised one another’s endurance and stamina. We! We had walked the Atlantic Ocean, a feat which mundane persons in our homelands said was impossible. We had pioneered a new frontier. Moreover, we would be rich. We would share in the wealth that this new trade route would bring to our countries, our cities, our towns and villages. We were such heroes!

Walking ashore over a lagoon, many of us realised we were not on a great mainland, but on a small island. Our feet were unsteady on firm ground and many kept losing their balance and falling over after walking on water so long. It is a fact that we walked with the same gait for quite a while after treading on soil, our muscles being used to treading waves, and we laughed at each other so peculiar did we appear with our evenly-timed and measured steps.