The Mapmaker's Daughter (7 page)

I lay awake all night wrestling with guilt. I wanted to be the most important child to Papa and now I will be. The cost? The lives of the two people I loved most. Now, the only member of our family left to go with my father to Raposeira is me.

4

SAGRES 1436

The sunlight makes a path across the covers of my bed as I sit up and pull a strand of hair out of my eyes. The air inside my room is cool, but I can feel the summer heat seeping through the window. I throw on a dress over my muslin undergarments and go out into the main room of the cottage.

My father, heedless of how the incessant wind makes the window behind him rattle, is at a table positioned to give him the best light for his work. Two oil lamps add to the light streaming through the window, setting the table aglow. The whitewashed walls cocoon us in peaceful, still air but can’t entirely mute the sound of the waves slamming against the cliffs in cracking booms and the shorebirds crying overhead.

Our servant, Tareyja, has left a breakfast of orange juice, bread, and a wedge of cheese. Papa has already eaten, I can see, by the crumbs on the breadboard. His cup is on the table, and I come over to ask if it needs filling.

He looks up, his eyes watering from the intensity of the work. “Are you well this morning?” he signs.

I nod my head. “Do you need anything?” He points to his cup, and I take it to the pitcher of orange juice and mix it with water, just the way he likes. When I bring it back, I come to his side to look at his work.

This map is not nearly as big as the atlas. It’s one piece of vellum, weighted down at the four corners with smooth beach stones. At the top is the southern end of Portugal and Spain, and at the bottom is the land just beyond Cape Bojador. Papa has added details from Gil Eanes’s logbook about the land south of the cape, but most of the new information comes from sea raids on Moorish fortresses north of there.

A few days ago, Papa painted a tiny gold-and-blue banner and crown at Raposeira to mark Prince Henry’s court, and just yesterday, he indicated the point at Sagres, where we now live, by a whitewashed stone tower like the one near our house. He hands me his magnifying lens, and I see a man and girl next to the tower. She looks like me, but so small he is using a brush with a single hair to paint her features.

“I’m on the map!” I sign to him, grinning. He makes a sad face, our sign for “sorry,” and taps the map at Cape Bojador. I had asked him to put my face on a mermaid, but there aren’t going to be such creatures on this map, or monsters inland either. The prince isn’t interested in any of that.

Prince Henry’s mind is occupied with only three things: what riches lie south of Cape Bojador, whether the Moors have gotten to them first, and if the people of those lands can be turned into Christians. He says he is sending his ships out to bring the word of God to the savages of Africa, confident that this will make them willing to trade exclusively with him, which will make him rich and starve out the Moors. The fact that all his goals work so well together, he says, is all the proof anyone should need of God’s will.

I make the sign for horse and raise my eyebrows to ask Papa’s permission to go riding. There’s not much to do here out on our lonely point, since most of the books and papers I used to read belonged to the Count of Medina-Sidonia and were left behind in Sevilla. Papa doesn’t worry about me being out on my own though. I am ten now, and in the two years we have lived here, I have come to know every patch of the peninsula at Sagres as well as I know my own bed. If I should get into trouble, someone will see me home. It’s so different from Sevilla, where what I did had to be carefully considered in case the neighbors were watching. Here, the only prowling eyes belong to the sea eagles soaring in the glorious sky.

He nods and goes back to his paint and brushes. When I go out the door, the wind finds me, and I lean into it forcefully in the direction of the stable. The sky is huge and blue, with a few low clouds hugging the horizon at sea. The cluster of buildings on the promontory—two cottages, a walled garden, a stable, a tiny chapel, and a watchtower—are so white they hurt my eyes.

I can see Tareyja’s husband Martim in the corral. He is about my father’s age and small like him, but strong and light on his feet. He and Tareyja are serfs who came at the prince’s orders to live in the caretaker’s cottage and tend to the needs of the deaf mapmaker and his daughter.

“Can I take Chuva out today?” I ask him. I named my Andalusian mare after the Portuguese word for rain, because her gray shoulders and haunches look like dust spotted with raindrops. A carriage transports Papa and me to Raposeira in bad weather, but I learned to ride when we first arrived, and we go everywhere we can on horseback.

Martim saddles up Chuva and holds the bridle while I get on. The wind-scoured rock is uneven and slippery—too hard on Chuva’s hooves to do anything more than pick our way forward, but beyond the promontory the footing in the scrub flowers and low grass is better, and I ease her into a trot. “Do you want to run on the beach?” I ask her, sure she understands because she tosses her head and nickers.

A gentle, sloping path leads to the water. The beach is a half-moon of sand, bounded on both ends by low cliffs and surf-carved rocks. The gentle breakers shimmer like strewn handfuls of jewels. I let out a laugh that comes from the deepest place within me. “Go, Chuvita!” I call out. “We’re the wind, you and I!”

Chuva’s stride lengthens when she reaches the packed sand near the water’s edge. Back and forth we gallop, her hooves splashing through the edges of the waves. I sing loudly to the sky, because in these moments, I am so free nothing can stop me, not even the ends of the world itself.

I dismount and leave my shoes and stockings on a rock while Chuva wanders over to a ragged patch of grass. Making my way to the water’s edge, I let the hem of my dress lift up as the surf hisses and crackles around my feet. It tickles my toes as it washes in and out, sinking my feet into the sand. The water is so cold it takes a moment to be comfortable enough to wade in up to my knees, soaking the back of my dress as I squint into the sun in the direction of the watchtower on the cliff top. Then, as always, I walk up the beach until I am too close to the cliff to be able to look up and see the buildings.

If Papa or Martim or Tareyja were to come to the cliff’s edge to look for me on the beach, they couldn’t find me. I feel reborn in these moments, and my imagination runs wild. If a stranger came along, I could make up any story at all, because no one would expect me to be the Amalia people know. I could be a gypsy girl, or perhaps a Moorish princess washed ashore from Africa, or a mermaid who suddenly discovers she has lost her tail and must live in the world of humans.

Even more than these stories, I love having nothing at all in my head except a feeling of comfort in the world. It’s not too hot or too cold, I am neither hungry nor uncomfortably full. I am out of the wind and the midday sun. Everything is perfect.

I tip my face to the sky. “Baruch atah Adonai,” I whisper. Saying a blessing at such moments still feels natural to me, although I’m really neither Christian nor Jew now. Living our solitary life at Sagres, I rarely go to mass. I would not have known it was Passover a few months ago if I hadn’t been at Prince Henry’s court for the day and overheard a Jewish visitor refusing to eat leavened bread, or Eastertide if the prince had not spent most of his time praying in his private chapel.

One day is like another on the cape—although I know I’ve missed Shabbat if we come into Lagos, the only real town near us, and I hear the Sunday bells ringing. It makes me sad to have drifted away from Mama’s ways, because it feels like losing her a second time, as if there is a place beyond the grave where the dead disappear only when they become strangers to the ways of the ones they left behind.

The rock I am sitting on feels jagged and hard now, and my throat is dry. I shift my weight, and my bottom feels numb. Tareyja will worry if I am late for dinner. I start back toward Chuva. “Are you ready to go home?” I stroke her nose and lean my head into her mane, and she whinnies to say she loves me too as we head up the path for home.

***

When I come back to our compound, I see a horse wearing the regalia of Prince Henry’s court tied up outside my house. I leave Chuva with Martim and hurry to see who is here. I feel guilty for being gone so long, because my father will have trouble communicating with whoever has come from Raposeira to see him.

Papa has rolled up his new map and is slipping it inside a leather case when I come in. “He’s been summoned,” the messenger tells me.

Before Martim has a chance to remove Chuva’s saddle, I am back astride and accompanying my father to Raposeira. We ride past white-sailed windmills and small farms, through grain fields and pastures dotted with cork oaks, across creeks and along ridges looking down to the sea, until an hour or so later, we arrive at Prince Henry’s palace.

It’s really no more than a large house, nothing like the Duke of Medina-Sidonia’s residence, where I used to interpret for my father. The first room is a vestibule with a stone floor covered with fresh straw to catch the dirt from people’s shoes. Except in the worst weather, the heavy palace doors are open, and dogs wander through, sniffing in the corners for scents and making water to mark their spot.

Anyone can come in this first room, but except for petitioners during set hours, only Prince Henry’s guests can cross the threshold to the antechamber. Inside, wall sconces and heavy iron standards hold lit torches day and night, but the light is dim enough that I have to stand close to the wall frescoes to see the details. One shows caravels heading across blue seas, carrying the banner of Portugal atop their masts. Here and there, a sea monster lifts its head and mermaids cavort—scenes that must have been painted before Prince Henry decided such things are foolish. The other fresco shows the Moorish ramparts at Ceuta, on the north coast of Africa. Led by the prince himself, Portuguese troops with banners and shields blazoned with crosses are routing the Moors, and flames rise from the besieged citadel.

Off the antechamber is a banquet hall big enough for no more than ten or fifteen people, because the prince does not entertain large groups. He is always dressed exquisitely and expects the same of those in his service, but a meal at Raposeira is no grander than at the inns where we stopped on our journey to Portugal, with pewter plates, soup, and heavily watered wine. I’ve heard Prince Henry wears a hair shirt next to his skin, and I suppose the meager fare and the shirt are part of something God demands, though I don’t understand why the Holy One would make someone a prince and then not let him enjoy it.

If I were a princess, I would have a huge palace. Perhaps if Prince Henry had a wife, she would insist on it. It seems odd he isn’t married, and I think he must miss having sons, since he seems partial to several of the young squires who attend him. A few go with so little protocol into the most private recesses of the palace that it seems as if it is their home as much as his.

My father told me that Henry chose a life of chastity as a young man, and he has never known a woman. He’s the head of the religious fraternity known as the Order of Christ, and though he hasn’t taken vows, he thinks he should set a good example by being chaste like the others. It would be rather pleasant to see women at court though. If he had a wife and daughters, someone might notice that I have outgrown all my dresses and need new shoes. As it is, I am invisible at my father’s side.

The squire ushers us out of the antechamber into the bedroom, the largest room in the palace, where the prince holds his audiences. Around a large table are a half-dozen men, most of them middle-aged like the prince, except one, Diogo Marques, who looks to be eighteen or twenty.

Prince Henry is standing in the middle of the group, poring over a roughly drawn navigator’s chart. I recognize three of his sea captains as frequent visitors to Raposeira.

“Senhor Riba,” the prince says. “Show us what you have, even if it isn’t finished.” I point to Prince Henry, then to my eyes, then to the leather case where my father stores his work. He pulls out his new chart and lays it on the table.

“Our latest ships went a hundred leagues beyond Cape Bojador and still haven’t found the mouth of the Gold River,” Prince Henry says, smoothing down the curling edges of the vellum. “It must be there. We have it on good authority in our sourcebooks.” My father has drawn the north and west coasts of Africa, including a river known as the Gold, which extends deep into the continent below Cape Bojador. Near the middle, it parts around a huge island Papa has labeled Insula Palola, a place some travelers’ accounts say is rich with gold.

Prince Henry’s face is long and square. Green eyes look out from under a broad-brimmed, velvet hat from which a few curls, gray at the temples, have escaped. His most notable feature is his hands. His fingers are thin and fragile for a man, and his nails are always well trimmed. He tents his fingers when he is lost in thought and touches his palms together in a single light clap when he has thought of something that excites him.

He is looking at the blank bottom of my father’s new map, devoid of anything but a rough outline to the south, representing the unknown reaches of the coast of Guinea, as the area below Cape Bojador is called. After running his finger off the lower edge of my father’s chart, the prince traces a straight line to the east. As he turns north and comes back onto the chart, he stops and taps his finger. “We should try to round Guinea—it cannot be much farther south than we have already gone.”

He makes a semicircle inland to indicate a large bay whose top is just below where my father has painted Egypt. “The Sinus Ethiopicus,” Prince Henry says. “I don’t understand why none of the Saharan traders has heard of a bay that is supposed to be as big as a sea.”

He looks at the group as if someone might have an explanation. “Perhaps there is no such place,” one of the men replies. “The traveler who described it has been wrong before. Some people doubt he visited many of the places he wrote about.”