The Mad Heat And The Relentless Rains

He had first met the man at the banquet, where the Queen received the golden mask, the banquet that had damned them both, and it was hardly by chance that they had been seated so near one another – the name had been heard before then, suggested by a zealous uncle or perhaps a father-in-law in connection with the voyage yet to be, and he knew him for his title alone. He knew the man was capable and vigorous, and had cautious enthusiasm for the richness this new land promised to men who were willing to shepherd it; his military exploits were impressive and his pedigree enviable.

The man was also, coincidentally, not a seasoned sailor. This quickly shows itself inconvenient once they are at sea.

His periodical absence from the great mass of men aboard does not go unremarked upon. Moxica was not green enough to let his discomfort show among hardier men, but still he spent his hours below decks, when he could manage it. Less staggering down there, but he slid about in his fine boots on the wood planking with the lamps swinging around him, irked and pale with nausea. Columbus goes below-deck one afternoon (when the rest of the men, all more or less filthy and enthusiastically covetous regardless of rank, are crowding up on deck to observe those signs that betray they are nearing their destination) and finds him there alone.

His coat and shirt he has set aside neatly folded, with extraordinary tidiness for one who by all accounts is on the brink of death by seasickness. Adrián seems to have just finished up washing his face and hands (a somewhat perplexing expenditure of fresh water) and he’s halted bent over the basin, a stray lock of dark hair dripping and casting beads of moisture down his shoulders.

He’s a finely-made man, handsomely and capably built for riding or for swordsmanship without the corded gross musculature of sailors or men accustomed to labor. In the light his skin is aristocratically sallow and without blemish; he has grace without a trace of softness, his waist is neat and slim, his shoulders broad and his back straight. In the course of his travels Columbus had nearly forgotten that men could look this way; certainly he is no beauty himself, so he is disinclined to hold others’ ugliness against them, but there’s something unsettling about such beauty. It is suggestive of wickedness.

(That night in Spain, the night of the execution of the heretics, he had gone to Beatriz and had been careless in lighting the way to her bed; he had hesitated too long in looking at her and a drop of wax had fallen against her naked brown shoulder, it had left a pale liquid blot atop a pink burn. His thoughts stray to this as he sees the water-drops against his skin too clearly.)

Columbus has seen no small amount of bare flesh in his voyages, of every possible color, painted even; sailors strip to the skin as soon as their slops become an inconvenience to them, and not one of the Indians have expressed the slightest tinge of shame about the bodies with which Nature has outfitted them. But the uncomfortable beauty of Moxica’s body makes him startle like a novice; he feels as if he was not meant to see it. (There is a bitter taste in his mouth, a tightness in his throat, but so he always is at sea.) Moxica is a nobleman by birth, every such man Columbus has ever known has taken great pride in his clothing but few as much as he; it feels wrong to see him so uncovered because under ordinary circumstances it would surely cause offense. Here not even a child would bat an eyelash at such a thing. Dire straits have a way of filing away at such high-minded manners; Columbus has never known them.

He gives him a black look over his shoulder as he proceeds to dress himself, tugging at his sleeves to straighten how the cloth hangs. There’s something odd and irritable in his glance, and in the quirk of his sensitive mouth.

The ship lurches again, and there is a great cry from above; Moxica is caught off guard, looking positively green, and Christopher touches his arm to steady him.

“Take courage, friend. Even the hardiest sailors suffer on such a voyage as this one,” he says, warmly. (It isn’t necessarily a lie.)

Don Adrián casts him a sideways glance that is pure venom, and brushes him away. From this moment on, Columbus knows they are unlikely to be friends.

That night, in the fitful pitching and lurch of the ship’s belly, he dreams of dark, dark hair.

Columbus considers the problem before him.

Adrián de Moxica will never look up to him to be guided, as the men of his first voyage had, as the native people once had and still do, with the naked admiration of children. He will never trust him. He will never be a friend to him, or like a comrade or like a brother; he cannot even be compelled to refrain from insult. He may bow his neck to the yoke in time, but obedience will not be had easily, and access to his heart – never. A curiosity of government in their little kingdom, situated as it is on the bleeding fringes of a great unknowable continent, that he can control a man only inasmuch as his body, only inasmuch as he fears death.

Such intractable arrogance ought to drive men away – but no, he reserves his affability for those who meet his standards and for whatever reason men do admire him. For his manners and his reputation in Spain, or his skill with a sword, or for his appearance, which is striking. He has a cruel face, and men think him vain. Men find him very beautiful.

To whose command would Moxica submit? His king’s? The queen’s? (The queen brilliant in gold, robed like the sun – Columbus understands why a man might worship her, having seen her that way, having seen the hair’s-breadth hardness of the lines around her eyes.) The Pope in Rome could not quell his offensive pride. A man like Moxica does not submit to the king, nor the Pope, nor to God, but least of all to a man he does not even consider his fellow.

He finds himself watching him especially attentively. He cannot trust him to work unless supervised, and he cannot trust him to cooperate with his fellows unless chided to do so. It’s altogether alien to Columbus’ sensibilities that any man would take such pride in obstructive idleness, yet, why shouldn’t he? He’s never had to work a day in his life, and would take offense at the suggestion that he start now; noblemen do not work, this is a natural fact. But La Isabela requires all hands at present, and if they do not all work, they will all starve regardless of degree. They must learn to live like the natives do, or die.

Columbus finds himself considering with envy, sometimes, of the idleness of his days. Moxica has the true luxury here of not caring whether the colony thrives or fails, and yet he refuses to leave outright, so that the sight of him is like a bruise, the pain being worse for being difficult to avoid, and for being provoked again by the slightest disturbance, a desire so easily rekindled. The desire for what – for him to bow his head to the yoke of communal life, for him to accept those things which Columbus has to offer him, to cease his grumbling and complaint and take part fully in this shared life?

(He has heard things, as well. Suggestions, intimations. Don Moxica and his companion Guevara share a woman, from time to time they will find a maid who strikes one or the other’s fancy and they both endeavor to lie with her, and this is not the wildest extreme of licentousness to which the men of the crew have loosed themselves, it is no more than all sailors do in every port, but he finds himself thinking more and more. By what conjunction of limbs and hands, in the oppressive heat and primal darkness, might such things be done? What if he in the course of his rounds might come upon him in the act? In what secret place do they hide themselves? There’s nothing criminal in it, even less so among sailors, but it raises his suspicions. Such men do not share unless there is something to be had for themselves. Such men do not keep their companions out of selflessness.)

The prison stinks of rot and it stands to serve its purpose. Punishment for drunkenness, lechery, petty theft amongst the men; Moxica’s hackles are up at the sheer indignity of being there, this Columbus can tell before he even speaks. In Spain, men of his degree are imprisoned in castles; here, he is no better than any other man, than the very man he mutilated. The wind whistles through the roughly-hewn poles that make up the prison’s supports, and carries with it the murmurs of distant disturbance. The guards will pretend not to hear their conversation, if they even speak the Christian tongue any longer, or ever had.

His ire swells, but he knows better than to raise his voice, and is too conscious of his own coarse accent. “I am not here to gawk at you. But my God, what you’ve done–”

“It is no sin to kill an animal,” Moxica says obstinately, picking at the tabletop with his knife. His low voice is tight with something Columbus cannot recognize at first; it is humiliation.

“Then what of disobeying your superiors? What of mutiny – did you think you would be above the law? In Spain I may not be fit to share your table, but here I am your superior, I act as a deputy of the queen herself. Do you think she will reward you for being so stiff-necked? Why in God’s name are you so resistant?”

His high-boned face twists with obvious resentment. “In Spain you would not be fit to shoe my horse. You are an immigrant, Colón, or had you forgotten? You keep house with a common whore and are attended by her bastards. In Spain you would not be fit to look at me.” And yet why is it that you look at me the way you do? his eyes dare.

He wants nothing so much than to beat his insolent face bloody, and to show him exactly what his birthright will get him in Columbus’ territories. He cannot; he does not.

Moxica falls to his death; Columbus takes up his sword belt and dagger from the ground where they lie discarded. What vanity it was that had driven him to set such ornaments aside, or simply the desire to hasten the fall, he didn’t know. When the men ask what they are to do with the body, he doesn’t know what to say. It lies exposed to the elements and to the predation of animals and insects for several days before any man cares enough to retrieve it. What remains is forced into a too-small box and sent back to Spain to be laid with its ancestors to await Judgment Day.

The sword he cares nothing for, and it is quickly lost as the sole spoils of a useless conflict, but the dagger he keeps beside his bed, for his own protection. He sleeps badly and drinks little, the water being spoiled by the damage brought by the storm. Gripping pains and dizziness become his close companions; he feels perpetually drunk.

He sees Moxica again in his nightmares.

In his dreams he is as aloof and immaculate as he was that first day on horseback ashore, and he gleams with silver thread against the black field of his coat. The firelight catches each precious stitch.

“Why the maps?” he asks; this is the question that has been stabbing at him all this while, but he already knows the answer. Even to himself he sounds dull-witted, his own accent ugly like the tug of a burr. “Why did you burn my maps? My plans?”

“Because it suited me.” Moxica walks along the tables that in life he’d set burning, touching each sheet of parchment in turn. (His hands are beautiful and his nails well-pared.) The settlement is laid out in miniature, and set out on his table is the colony which was to be, made orderly, harmonious, beautiful. Each sheet is priceless; there must be dozens of them. Mapmaking is difficult work, draftsmanship as well as the delicate inking-in of seas and land masses; the papers are dry but the air is sickly-thick with the fumes of spilled brandy. These plans have been carried over oceans, further west than men once thought possible. They have been carried lifetimes away, only to be burned. “Because I hated them, and because I hated you. Your brothers were mapmakers, not governors, and a lowborn man has no need of,” he spreads his fingers over a map that Columbus has never owned and has never seen before, and when he comes closer in his dream to get a better look he isn’t able to see, “great architects. You built nothing more than a collection of hovels. You could hardly build a bell tower.”

“I had always been good to you,” Columbus says, lost in his own bewilderment. “I would have given you anything, if you had only listened to me I would have given you everything–”

Moxica turns to glance at him over his shoulder. His profile stands out against his dark smooth hair, like the blade of a knife.

“I burned them because they were useless to you and because they were beautiful. And nothing beautiful could ever be yours, Signor Colombo, could it. Look around you,” and the room is in ruins now, a ghastly echo of what his own temper could have wrought, all stinking of wet ash and burned flesh, “do you see anything beautiful here? In your new world?” Something unhinged enters his voice that is not at all polished or aloof. He nearly snarls. “This place is Hell.”

And he looks like he did then, before they covered up what was left of him and scraped it into a box to return to Spain. Columbus wakes from his dream with a cry, grasping for his crucifix, and all his hands seize on in the dark is the cold metal of the blade that was Adrián’s.