Hurricane...

Sheets, cascades of rain met him on the deck driving pellets into his face. Veins of lightning shot the sky turning the night into weird, flashing colours and bursts of thunder cracked with a supernatural violence. Then the ship rolled again and he felt the sea rising up to drown the deck. He grabbed a railing as spume washed over him, tugging at him, wanting to sweep him into its maw. When it passed he climbed quickly up a stern ladder.
   Sotil was on the after deck. In the illuminations of lightning Juan Ponce caught a glimpse of his pilot’s face, tight with tension. The boatswain was beside him ready for his commands. Their captain-general greeted them harshly.
   “Why was I not awakened?”
   “It came upon us but a while ago!” Sotil had to shout to be heard. “It wasn’t so bad until now. I’m sending the helmsman below. The whip staff will do us no good in this. He must be at the rudder.”
   “Are all hands stood to?”
   “They are, your honour!” the boatswain replied. He was a tough old sea-dog named Fernando Medel, built square and strong and with nerves of iron. He actually smiled as he answered. The boatswain was in his element.
   “We must tree the sails!” Sotil ordered. “If it isn’t done quickly, we’ll lose some of them. Have men ready to haul in immediately!”
   “Aye, sir!” The boatswain smiled more grimly this time and left for the main deck already relaying orders. His voice was nearly as loud as the thunder.
   “Have you any orders, captain-general?” Sotil turned to Juan Ponce.
   “It’s your command, pilot. Do what you must but do it quickly. This will get worse.”
   “We’ll have to come about and close haul. If it does get worse, it’s our only chance!”
   In the lightning bursts Juan Ponce watched his sailors climb the rat lines up to the yards while others stood to at the clew lines ready to release them. He knew how dangerous this was and cursed himself for not listening to his pilot and reefing the sails in the evening calm. Now it was too late and men might die for his error. Glancing across at Sotil he saw the same emotions. But there was no time for recrimination. The pilot stepped up to the railing to shout commands.    At his word men hauled down on the clew lines drawing the main course up into itself. The men on the yard, holding desperately to it with their legs, hauled in and slowly the great sail, fighting them for its freedom, began to furl. Other parties worked the foresail. It was like watching men in a madhouse, the sweeps of rain and waves and wind adding to the illusion as they buffeted the ship. Men clawed at the rigging and shrieked to each other to be heard above the howl. Big breakers lashed at the ship, their tips as high as the freeboard, their spray as they broke upon the deck, iridescent.
   There was trouble on the foresail. The hemp had swollen with the wet and the men could not cast loose the lines. Sailors feverishly pulled at the thick ropes. Then the boatswain, cursing fearfully above the wind, took an axe to the lines, cutting them, letting them fly loose writhing like beheaded snakes. The sail, flapping wildly, began to furl. The canvas snapped in the wind like gunfire until the crew gained control of it. Finally, after what seemed hours, the martinets were secured on the yard and the sails were held close to their crosstrees. Immediately, Sotil shouted down the hatch for the helmsman below to come about. He used the wind in the mizzen to push the ship round and for a moment the sturdy caravel seemed to roll almost onto its side. Juan Ponce heard a man scream. He knew what it meant. Someone had lost his hold and been swept overboard. There would be no chance for him. The storm had claimed him for its own.
   This is like my dream, thought Juan Ponce. This is like war.
   The ship righted itself and faced into the storm, its lateen rigged mizzen holding it there, the helmsman below fighting the rudder to help it. A second helmsman was placed on the rudder as well to help the struggling sailor there who, each time the ship crested a wave and fell back into a trough, was tossed about like a doll on a puppeteer’s stick. Sotil ordered parties amidships to man the pumps. Other men lashed down cargo which had broken loose. The animals, kept below, had panicked. Word came up that two men had been trampled while trying to calm the horses. Mayhem. The storm’s fury increased.
   It bent its full force on the caravel. All night it tried and tried again to capsize the ship. It laid traps, ambuscades of deep troughs and wind shifts and huge breakers which would come at the vessel from two sides, choosing courses at random, turning and turning about in a maelstrom of seething water. Dawn came but few noticed, so deep and thick and low were the storm clouds. The air became lion coloured, then almost green. Below decks, the passenger-colonists fouled the air with sea sickness and the stench of terror. The master-at-arms was sent to prevent their attempts to come up to the deck. Once loyal soldiers now seethed toward the hatches stopped by mariners locking the iron grates, imprisoning them in their roiling dungeon. Finally, it became necessary for Juan Ponce himself to confront them.
   At the head of the mutineers was the zealot.

 ​Ross Porter...

And then he awakens. 
   His head still spins. The taste of salt is in his mouth. His body is sheened in sweat. Daylight shows through a crack in the curtains. It is a Sunday morning, he becomes aware; the day after his retirement party. Ross Porter wakes too suddenly from his sleep. It has been a fractional sleep filled with frightening, twisting dreams. He cannot recall much of them but the last one, the ocean. Before there had been another dream: some sort of foot-sucking quagmire through which he had slogged, a half-submerged meandering swamp trail lined with bearded trees whose branches interlaced above him. The dreams have been recurring a while now; months actually. They trouble him deeply.
   He awakens with the unfamiliar pangs of a hangover: the kind brought on by cognac and cigars yet also by those unknown depths he has only just now in his dreams confronted. This hangover has brought much more than a queasy stomach and headache; it is the kind which displaces his mind.
   Emily is dying.
   His first truly conscious thought rattles him. His Emily: his partner, friend, lover, his wife is going to die and there is nothing at all he can do to save her. This is no dream. His awful thoughts stay with him as sunlight seeps through a chink in the bedroom drapes. It illuminates a shard of the room in hard gloss. His eyes follow the light. He glances toward the gifts from last night: the golf bag he will never use lying by the door and eleven volumes of Durant’s History of Civilization still in their packing on the floor. He glimpses his rumpled suit hung over a chair with a rose in its lapel. The rose has withered.
   His gaze lifts past the chair to the wall above the dresser. A portrait of the family hangs there: Emily before her illness, himself with a hand on her shoulder standing beside his son Robert. His grandson Justin, blond curls and impish round face, is tucked in the lap of Robert’s wife, Anne, seated seamlessly beside Emily. He is more proud of that picture than any baubles of retirement. It represents something intimate, lasting.
   He’d thought.
   He reaches for water on the night table and misjudges the distance. The glass falls with a wet thud, staining the grey broadloom black. He swings his legs over the side of the bed and leans down to pick up the glass. Suddenly the room spins. A fluttering in his chest frightens him. He keeps his head down and tastes once again the burn of cognac. He gives himself a few moments, then slowly rises, testing himself, and goes into the bathroom. Ross Porter is not accustomed to this. He is fifty-nine years old. Things should not end at fifty-nine. And then, perhaps because of the hangover, or perhaps because of the withered rose and spilled water glass, Ross Porter apprehends that he will die; get old, and die. But first he must watch his wife perish before him; end hard in the grip of her disease.
   He cannot know her death will also create a beginning. No one can read the uncertain future; particularly one’s own. 
  He glares into the mirror at what he sees glaring back: touches of grey in his chestnut hair, lines on his narrow face, his pale blue eyes now steely in the mirror’s harsh light. He must shake away the shadow and go downstairs to Emily. He must find a way to keep up appearances, bolster the spirit within her wasting body. He takes a hot shower scrubbing off the hangover, feeling the scald of the water wash away his perplexing tremors and gradually he becomes what she needs. She does not need the remains of last night: the self-indulgent husband drinking his way through a celebration of himself. He must think only of her today.
   She is with me today. That is the true celebration.

 Juan Ponce de Leon...

Juan Ponce de Leon looked over his ship from high in the stern castle. At first his gaze fell on the mainmast: its great sail spread, hanging limp in the breezeless dusk. Down the deck crowded with bales and barrels and men, twilight thickened. Amidships where the bombards rested some sailors had gathered. He heard the strains of a lute and considered the irony of such soft music amidst iron cannon. Even now he was losing sight of them. It always amazed him how quickly it grew dark in this new world. Behind him the watch leader lit the signal lantern. He noticed  across the darkening sea a pinpoint of light where the lantern of his ship’s sister glowed. And then came the watch leader’s deep-throated shout.
   “Good watch, starboard lookout!”
   “Bright green!” came the reply.
   “Port lookout, good watch!”
   “Bright red, sir!”
   In a moment the bow announced: “Bright top!” and the routine was completed. It would continue like this all night at each turn of the glass. It did not disturb the other sailors. Rather it comforted them hearing the ancient chorus, knowing their comrades kept the good watch. The hard voices of men can sometimes seem soothing, Juan Ponce contemplated. This is a good ship, he thought, and good men I have chosen.
   He was the metaphor of his ships. Though of noble blood he did not, somehow, fit the part. Rather, he was the weathered lines of a seaman, the brazed skin of the labourer, the soldier’s sinews and grim scars, the grey close cropped hair of a monk. His clothing was practical. In the evening warmth he’d discarded his doublet leaving only a linen shirt, unlaced at the neck, and economic buckskin hose. Round his right shoulder was slung a thick leather belt and from it, at his left hip, hung the tool of his trade. In an age of earrings and jewelled fingers this man wore only a silver cross and Toledo steel at his side.
   He was fifty-two years of age. Thirty-five of them had been spent fighting: against the Moors in Isabella’s great Reconquista in Spain, then under Ferdinand among these islands against the native Taino and Carib. Now he knew he would fight again: the Calusa. He had a new king now, Charles. He had lived through three rulers, fought for them, conquered new lands for them, and in return they had given him — nothing.
   The time had come for himself.
   Age had wearied but not weakened him. Men still feared him. He found fear a useful tool but there were cracks in his armour now. He could feel them in the aches which had never been there before, in the shortness of days which had once seemed so long. His power waned as an outgoing tide. It was inexorable. Now was his final chance, he knew. There would be none after this. He stiffened a little at the thought. The helmsman beside him, thinking he had made some error, straightened as well and paid careful attention to his work. But his captain-general made no remonstrance. Instead he climbed down from the deck and went below.
   The cabin was dark. He crossed to his desk to light the lantern which hung from a beam above it. Even in the dark he knew the witch was there. He could hear her breathing from the narrow bed. When the lantern was lit she continued sleeping, the long ropes of her hair coiling about her, her body dark brown and undulant. He studied her for a while: a beautiful, savage face.
​   Then he turned to his desk.​

 Ross Porter's dream...

He is driving a car; driving down a dirt lane under mammoth trees smothered in Spanish moss that sways as if it were conscious. He is on a quest with some unnamed goal. There is someone else in the car with him: a woman — some ethereal presence. Yet he can’t take his eyes off the corridor running between the trees to see who it is. The track is precarious. It is rutted and narrow and overhung with branches like fingers which scrape on the roof of the car. He worries about his car’s paint. He keeps to the narrow trail. The person with him is some kind of guide. She is not Emily. He does not know her, does not even attempt a look at her. The path narrows further. Danger on either side. Then the trees form a wall in front of them: a green leafy mass. The car can go no further.
   He stops the car and gets out. The air about him is thick and hot. It stinks of mould. He can feel sweat trickle down his back. He spies an opening, an aperture through the branches, forbidding and shadowed. He sees his hand in front of him pointing down that dark tunnel.
   “Don’t go in there, Ross,” the woman’s voice utters. Not Emily’s. “You’ll be alone.”
   “I am alone,” he says back.
   A hand on his shoulder. Cold hand. He shrugs it off but it returns; on his shoulder like ice. She is trying to stop him from following his path.
   “Ross. Ross?”
   A woman’s voice; this one familiar.
   He comes heavily back to consciousness.
   Emily shakes him gently, a silhouette in the darkened room.
   “Are you alright, Ross? You’re sweating buckets.”
   “I was . . . dreaming.”
   His heart is beating too fast, pounding. He is drenched in salt sweat. Emily turns on the light. The light snaps off the final fragments of the dream.
   “Are you sick?” she asks quietly.
   “No. No, I’m alright, Em. Just a nightmare. I’ve never . . . it felt so real.”
   Somewhere in the back of his mind: old, bearded trees.
   Spanish moss.
   A guide?
   “It’s passed now?” she says.
   “What?”
   “Your dream?” Her voice is filled with dread. She is frightened.
   “What time is it?” he asks.
   “Nearly five. What was it about?”
   “What?”
   “Your dream.”
   “I can’t remember,” he says, lying.
   “Do you want to get up?”
   Anything not to think of trees.

Juan Ponce de Leon's secret journal...

There is no storm so violent as that made by men. I know this now. I was born into war, trained to wage war, cultured in its ways and means. We lived for one purpose then: to take back holy Spain from the infidel Moors. I was at Ronda and then at Malaga when the Reconquista began to bear fruit; when Isabella and Ferdinand allied themselves in marriage and joined together the realms of Castile and Aragon and we began to defeat the Africans. It was, I think now, the last true Crusade and I am still proud to have been part of it.
   It was Don Pedro who sent me to my destiny. I went willingly. I had grown tired of the indolence at court and, having failed there, I dreamed of what I thought was a warrior’s glory. My armour shone, my horse pranced as I joined the column of men who set out to fight the holy war. Don Pedro had given me his own sword and I planned to make it more famous.
   My first battle was a skirmish, a minuscule gust in the great winds of war. I captained a supply troop then, too young to be trusted on the battle lines. We were ambushed by a squadron of Moors. They rode down on us from a rocky ridge. There was no time for fear. They were upon us and we fought them. I killed a man then; my first. Since then I have killed a hundred men and ordered the deaths of hundreds more but this one I remember the most.
   He had dark skin and sleek, long hair. I will always remember his hair flying in the wind as he galloped toward me. He charged his mount into mine trying to bowl us over. His scimitar cut at my head. But my horse had stumbled drawing me out of harm’s way. He charged again. We parried and parted then his horse turned away from mine and in that instant I reached out and thrust my blade into his back. I pulled on my sword and the Moor came with it off his horse to the ground. As he struggled to rise I plunged my mount over him, the hooves battering him. I had no time then to observe the result. I fought on against others and dust rose around us. After a time, I don’t know how long, the Moors retreated. We did not give chase.
   When we had cared for our wounded and drunk thirstily from the wineskin of victory, I went back to the place where I had killed a man. He lay there, broken like a child’s doll; his hair caked with dirt and dried blood, his dark skin paled by the yellow dust. I did not grieve for him. He was my enemy. But neither did I rejoice. All I felt was a kind of relief. I had proved myself as a soldier.

 Emily's character...

Emily, the bride out of high school. They can’t afford marriage but she isn’t worried. She has wanted this, she’s said, since their first dance in the gym in ninth grade. How hard it had been, he thinks, to have asked her: to cross the floor in front of his friends and ask the cute girl with the orange sweater to dance. The music was Elton John, “Your Song”. Strange to remember a song and a place and a time, and emotions, so clearly. 
   After the dance, after their first walk home and first kiss goodnight, they began to date: movies on Friday nights and parties in friends’ houses usually in rec rooms or basements. He found himself more and more enraptured by this girl so quiet and conservative. She played the piano, her lessons each week a chance for him to meet her and walk her home. At those times she would speak of Beethoven or Bach; how she loved the music he’d never heard. 
   He felt she was far too close to her father. That man was the reason for her conventional ways. He would take her to concerts or museums, just the two of them wrapped in a culture they’d shared since she was old enough to appreciate it. When her father had discovered Ross’ interest in history, he began every once in a while to include him on their outings. Those times had not been the most comfortable with Ross on the outside listening in. Once in a while Emily would touch his hand surreptitiously, wanting to include him, hesitant with her father around.
   She possessed a mildness which concealed her intelligence, her bright spirit, and a subtle need to differentiate from her father. But she would not succumb to that need. She was loyal. Ross wanted to see more of her, be exclusive, the custom back in those days when you found someone special. But despite his presence at their family dinners, once each month, Ross could never break the shell of fidelity Emily and her father shared.
   So he left her. He joined the track team and spent hours training, working off his frustration. He won a few races. He enjoyed the company of his team mates. There were other girls. He was young and needed to explore. But always, always, she was at the back of his mind as the presence to whom he compared all the others. He’d eventually spent a miserable summer trying to be like everyone else, trying to fit into the adolescent world which constantly changed around him, trying to draw him away from the beacon that was Emily.
   At the start of the next school year, unforeseen by him on one ordinary day, she did something completely unanticipated and socially supernatural. She simply walked up to him in the school hallway. His head was inside his locker so he hadn’t seen her coming. When he heard her voice, he was so shocked he banged his head on the locker’s upper shelf.
   “Oh God, are you alright?” she exclaimed apologetically.
   “Yeah, uh, yeah I’m . . .”
   “Let me see. You might have a cut.”
   “No, it’s alright. Why’re you here?”
   “I want to talk to you.”
   “Yeah?”
   “I’d like to know why you stopped seeing me.”
   He had not expected that kind of directness, that steel in a girl of fifteen. Then again, knowing Emily, he should have. He found it difficult to find the right words to explain his feelings. In the end she found them for him with an honesty which was always the most wondrous part of her.
   “I, uh, I just thought we should take a break. It was getting too serious,” he mumbled.
   “I thought you were the one who gave me a ring.”
   “You wouldn’t take it.”
   “Because of my dad . . .”
   “What’s with him anyway?”
   “He wants to protect me. He thinks I’m too young. I love him, Ross, but not the way I love you.”
   “What? You . . . love me?”
   “There, I’ve said it. So now you can do what you want with it.” Tears glistened the hazel of her eyes as she stood there trying to be brave. Within that moment in a school hallway he knew he’d never again give her up.
   “You love me?” he uttered again, loving the sound of the  words.
   “I had a talk with my dad. He can’t change, but he’s okay with us seeing each other.”
   “You’ll wear my ring?” He tried to make it hard for her, his boy’s pride exerting itself.
   “On a chain round my neck. I can’t flaunt this in front of dad. Is that so important?”
   “This isn’t easy . . .”
   “You think I don’t know that? I’m sure it’s already around the whole school I’ve come here to see you.”
   “Forget the ring. You’re right. I’m sorry. You really love me?”

Mayaimi...

Her name was Mayaimi, from the union of Calos and her mother. Her mother had been of the Timucua tribe, the Mayaimi clan, noble, though not royal as Calos of the Calusa.
  The Spaniard called her by another name, a name without grace or meaning, a name befitting the slave they had tried to make her. She never used it for, in her own mind, she was never a slave.
  The dolphins recalled her home. As she sat in the sun she remembered, for the first time in a very long time, the things she had put aside for Calos. At first it was small memories: weaving nets for fishing, gathering berries and roots from the land, collecting the shellfish which would become both food and lodging. After their insides were eaten the shells were piled and moulded to become the base for the tribe’s dwellings in the mangrove swamps. And then she recalled the house of Calos, big enough for a hundred to gather to hold the sacred ceremonies of the three souls. Men and women together: the women singing, the men wearing masks of beasts and birds to which all souls belonged, to which she would belong eventually after passing through water. All that she had given up. Then there were the things she had forced away.
  As if she would ever succumb to the foolish mumblings of the stinking monk who was always trying to persuade her to believe in a nothing; a common man ridiculed and slaughtered at the hands of his enemies on a wooden cross. That could not be a god. Even when the stinking monk spoke of threes: of father and son and spirit, they were not the right threes, they were nothing at all like the three who ruled all things. The monk had no notion that she was a sorceress: holy in her own way, noble in her birth, a woman who could commune with spirits, a sacrifice by Calos and a spy as well sent to discover the ways of the stinking Spanish.
  They did stink. They smelled of the animal meat they consumed so voraciously. Even before she had reached the huge cloud canoe they inhabited she had nearly retched from the stench. And when they had stripped her and begun to abuse her, those things had bothered her less than their breath in her face.
  Then their chief, the big Spaniard she called him, had claimed her and taken her far across the sea to his home on the island of the slave people who served every Spanish whim: their pride wiped from them, their customs destroyed, their worth as a people reduced to nothing. When they tried to befriend her, she rebuffed them. When she was taken into those dank stone dwellings the Spanish seemed to prefer and forced into the confines of clothing which rubbed rough against the body, so different from the soft moss she had worn at home, she had not succumbed. When they had made her servile: scrubbing stone floors, sweeping stone walkways, laundering their stinking clothes, she had borne it all for Calos.

Jim and Maggie White...

Jimmy fixes the air conditioner. He was a mechanic, he says, for trains. He is seventy-four, has four children and seven grandchildren, worked for the CPR all this life, hates politicians, and is worried that if he gets ill his wife, Maggie, will have to go into a home. All this Ross discovers in the time it takes Jimmy to complete the repair and have two bourbons on ice. Jimmy likes to talk. He says it’s all he does well any more. Not like the old days. His glasses slip down his nose as he speaks. He keeps pushing them back. He is formal when he meets Emily. He calls her Mrs. Porter despite her protestations. While he returns home to wash and bring Maggie over, Ross starts the barbecue. Emily makes a salad, fussing a little at the suddenness of company but grateful for the air conditioning.
   Maggie is a big, robust woman who laughs easily and, though nervous initially, is quite friendly. At first glance there seems nothing wrong with her but soon it becomes apparent she is struggling. She repeats everything Jimmy says. He is her safe haven. If she follows his lead she will not be embarrassed. This much she knows. Her character still remains but self-assurance has left her. She knows what is happening to her. She struggles against it. But it is inexorable. At dinner Jimmy fills her plate for her. Once she takes Emily’s drink by mistake. Everyone ignores it. The table talk turns to economics.
   “Down here everything’s cheaper,” Jimmy says, “dependin’ on the exchange rate, of course.”
   “Cheaper . . .” Maggie echoes.
   “But you gotta look in the newspaper ads to see when things are on sale.”
   “On sale . . .”
   “Me and another fella get up early Wednesday mornings. Go over the ads then drive down the strip so’s we can
have our pick. If you don’t go early everything’s gone. Why just last week, where was it, dear, one of the groceries.”
   “Groceries . . . I don’t know.”
   “Just let me think now.”
   “Yes,” Maggie says softly.
   “Damn, what was the name of that place?” It is important to Jimmy that he remember.
   “The place . . . yes . . .”
   “Wynn Dixie! Sure.”
   “Wynn Dixie,” Maggie echoes triumphantly.
   “Why they had corned beef on there so cheap you’d think you were stealin’ it! Me and this fella got there late. His car wouldn’t start.”
   “Wouldn’t start,” Maggie says, sadly.
   “Well by the time we fixed it and got there the corned beef was gone; every last ounce of it, by God. And it was only nine thirty in the morning!”
   “Isn’t that awful,” Maggie ventures. She looks over at Jimmy to be sure she is right.
   “I’d say so,” Jimmy says, patting her hand. He is proud of her.
   Jimmy gets a bit drunk after that and tells stories from the old days. He tells them well, anecdotes of a life, but they go on a little long. Maggie listens blissfully. These are memories she vaguely recalls. It is as if her old life is new again.
   This is timelessness too.​

Sotomayor...

He was a huge man, blessed with prodigious strength. Younger than Juan Ponce, he had arrived with Ovando when that nobleman had been sent as Viceroy after Columbus had been arrested and forever refused ownership of the lands he’d discovered. Sotomayor knew little of this. He had simply signed on to make his fortune. Many men came with the same reasons. But there were not many like Sotomayor.
   He was assigned to Juan Ponce’s squadron at the beginning of Ovando’s terror. The Viceroy’s plan was simple: end the anarchy in Hispaniola with an iron fist. If a tribe would not submit, eliminate it: men, women, children, animals, houses, crops. Leave nothing but ash. Juan Ponce de Leon became Ovando’s most trusted captain in this. He followed the orders because he saw their sense. And Sotomayor followed Juan Ponce. Absolutely. Perfectly. Without mercy. Neither man was troubled by slaughter. It was merely the business of war.
   Juan Ponce treated Sotomayor as the son he wished he had had. And Sotomayor returned that favour with complete loyalty. He had profited, but he found his love for battle far outweighed that for gold. Juan Ponce de Leon gave him both. It was a bonding of minds. Even in the bad days, when his mentor had been outmanoeuvred and forced to give up his positions, the fiery lieutenant had stayed with him.
   And finally, when Juan Ponce de Leon had decided to claim again what was rightfully his, to muster this voyage, his obvious second was Sotomayor. Even the witch had smiled when she heard his lieutenant was to join them. Juan Ponce did not try to understand why. Perhaps Sotomayor reminded her of her own tribe’s warriors: tall, fearless, and deadly. Juan Ponce might be the brain of the expedition but Sotomayor was its sword. They would have need of that sword, he knew. The last time had been hard. A pine forest island called Slaughter. That had been mere exploration.
   This time they had come to claim.
   Thoughts of Sotomayor cheered him. Their marriage of arms had been more complete, more honest and forthright, more filled with joy than his actual marriage. Leonor had hated Sotomayor. She had called him common, bloodthirsty, ambitious. Sotomayor had accepted her insults passively. And when she died he’d attended her memorial and comforted the family as best he knew how. His loyalty shone.
   It was after that when Juan Ponce, for the first time, had lied to him. It was not difficult. Sotomayor was not an intricate man. He believed without question the tale of founding a new colony. And so he too had been deceived. Thinking these things brought the old man to his parchment again. The past was his only solace now with the future held in abeyance.

 Leonor...

It was during the wars in Spain that I married. My mother had died while I was away and so I was unable to bid her goodbye. It created a kind of emptiness in me. I began to feel a need for permanence, for a woman to somehow fill that chasm for which I have so little understanding. Children were a part of it. Each man wishes his name carried on. But it was more than that. It was time, for some reason, to marry. There was no rationality to it; only a strange new mood.
   I left it to my father to arrange it, knowing he would choose wisely and well. It would be a union of houses, the business of marriage. My reputation, solid by then, and my maturity made the matchmaking easier. I was past marital age. Not old, but certainly no young man either. And by this time I considered myself more adept socially. I had made the acquaintance of ladies at court as well as that of the camp prostitutes. In my arrogance, I thought I knew women.
   Leonor was of noble birth, of course; her family of like circumstance to mine. Her father was an honourable man. He provided a dowry of twenty five hundred escudos. Not a great sum, but reasonable. She was sixteen when I first met her. I had no idea what to expect as I presented myself to the family. I remember it was early evening, the sun cool and low in the sky. 
   Her father was just a little older than me: a plain man, rather bookish and dour, and I think slightly in awe of this rough captain who had entered his house to claim his daughter. We took wine together. He asked about the war. There was no talk of the daughter until his wife appeared to take me to meet her. His wife was a plain woman, very shy. I began to despair of my father’s choice. In his dreams each man wishes a beautiful wife, one of whom he can be proud, one who pleases his senses as well as his house.
   I prepared myself for the worst.
   She was in the garden. She sat on a bench in a bower of orange trees, their blossoms pungent; their webbed branches holding the twilight magically. I felt in that instant like a boy, giddy with anticipation, an odd mixture of fear and hope mingling and making the heart beat just a little faster, making my senses alert and crisp, so that when she stepped out of that dappled grove in a glance I was able to see everything and remember it, perfectly, to this day.
   She took my breath away.
   This all happened in seconds, yet I recall it seeming to last much longer. When she stepped into view she had covered her face with a fan and so, quickly, I studied the rest of her. Her gown was of green moiré silk. It rustled like restless leaves. The fastenings down the front were embroidered in silver which sparkled like early stars in the twilight. They raised to a low cut bodice and beneath the dress a lace chemise. The fan itself was organza inset with pearls. It concealed all of her face but her eyes. And it was her eyes which took me.
   Her eyes were green. They were cool. Lagoons of sea green, touched with sparkle, just like the sea if the sea were perfect. Her hair was shot through with auburn, her flesh pale and almost porcelain. I have seen its like only in those delicate figures which arrive sometimes from Cathay. She seemed so fragile, so feminine, I feared one touch would shatter her.
   And then she lowered the fan. She smiled. This will stay in my memory forever. It was not just her mouth that smiled, her lips full and curved like scallops of sand on a shore, but the coolness of her eyes changed to that emerald flash one glimpses, if he is watchful, as the sun sets upon the New World’s sea. Her flesh dimpled a little at the corners of her mouth, and within her smile there seemed a quick flame that glowed and reached out to touch me so I was infected and smiled as well, just to keep the warmth, hold the rose in her cheeks. She smiled as if she smiled only for me.
   She was beautiful.
   I thought then that beauty meant something. I thought it meant sensitivity, a softness of soul not to be found in harsh features like my own. It was hard to think otherwise in the face of such symmetry, such radiance as lived in the smile of Leonor. The sea has great beauty, yet it is capable of other things: of storms, of rip tides, of hidden shoals. The sky is vast, and yet one lives beneath but a small part of it. How was I to know then that Leonor was merely beautiful flesh, that within lay a soul like bitter herbs and a mind obsessed with smallness. I did not realise she could call up that smile when it suited her, only when it suited her, and the rest of the time she used her cool eyes to hide her feelings just as the sea conceals its dangers beneath placid waves.
   In time we married. In bed that first night there was nothing. She lay still and silent while I raged on top of her trying to make it love. I thought it was merely the loss of virginity. But it kept on. She would submit but it was only that: submission, duty, disdain. It was not long before I went back to the war.
   War loves me.
   While I was gone my son was born. I did not see him until he was three. She named him Luis. He had eyes like hers. The first time I saw him he shook my hand. I have never kissed my son.
   With time her obsessions grew. She had married a man from whom she’d expected great things. She wanted the best of Venetian glass, silver from Milan, plate from Cathay, Antwerp tapestries and Rhenish chalices. She wanted each thing about her to be as beautiful as she. I was a soldier. A very good soldier. I had my share of booty. But it was never enough. And when she discovered my ineptitude at court her disappointment in me was complete. The business of her marriage was bankrupt.
   She told me that, many times.
   Only once was she happy. It was when I had earned the governorship of the island of San Juan Bautista. Only then did she deign to come here to the Indies to share life with me. She was the one who demanded a capitol at San Juan de Puerto Rico. She wanted a house like those she had known in Spain. I built it. It cost many natives their lives. It cost me financial damage. But I saw her smile again. Once.
   And when I lost my position as governor, she left for home. I lost it through intrigue at court, through Diego Colon, the son of Columbus my friend, through snivelling men a thousand leagues distant who plotted without my knowing. Yet Leonor blamed me. She had raised my son and my daughters to loathe me. She had taught them gentility and intrigue, the things at which she was so adept. Oh, it was my fault as well. I was absent too often. I never knew them. I was too busy fighting my wars. And when I was home I could not find the way to show them how much I had missed them. I fell into the only method I knew. I became like my own father. My children grew distant as I had done.
   I have never been one to express emotion. I thought, when we married, Leonor would change that: make me more human, give me the softness I have always felt but not shown. How was I to know, on that quiet evening in a twilit garden, there are those in this world who do not even feel?
   And yet each time I break open an orange to drink of its juices and eat its sweet meat, its pungency reminds me of her; of that first evening before I knew her when, for a moment, I was in love.

The Swamp and the Spring...

It is a cathedral, this place, its immense black bark pilasters buttressing an emerald leafy dome; all down from that high ceiling run adornments of climbing vines and dusky flags of Spanish moss. Its windows are openings in the leaves where the sun dazzles through to light ensconced flowers. Its stations are rising hammocks set apart from the flat of the liquid floor. And it contains secretive places too, confessionals set in the darkest grottoes and below its vegetal base and black water, the crypts which contain the remains of its tenants.
   Its choir consists of a flock of storks nesting high in the tops of the trees. From their lofty stalls they drone chants echoing through the temple. Accompanying them is the organ sound of croaking frogs, their vocal chords sounding like old, dry pipes opened by comical fingers playing on stiffened keys.
   The pilgrim enters the nave, a huge grassy marsh in the swamp’s very centre. The sky opens out above him a cyanic blue and the rushes whisper in the breeze of the open place. Dragonflies dart about him on iridescent wings. He clutches his votive offering in his left hand, a rusty relic from another time, and his right arm pushes the rushes aside as he moves to the centre of the expanse. He can see, not far off, an oasis of trees, the altar on which he must place himself, knowing it is the heart of this feral temple.
   He slogs toward it. He is parched. He is dirty and tired as all pilgrims are when they reach the climax of their wanderings but his faith is immaculate. He knows without doubt he has reached the source.
   The laughter of running water.
   At his feet now is a burbling diaphanous spring, a fountain a few inches high in the midst of grey limestone. Ferns and flowers mark its circumference. The rippling pool is clear and unclouded but the depth from which the fountain gushes he has no way of telling, for the fountain itself conceals its well in the sparkle and dance of its effluence. In the water the rocks are gilded with a pearl shimmer. A rainbow of coloured crystalline pebbles lines the sides of the pool. They appear like jewels from the greater depths thrown up by the force of the water. The pilgrim kneels beside the pool to look deeper into its mysteries. He wonders what properties it might contain. This close the water’s aroma is acrid. At first this disturbs him but he soon discerns it must constitute elements which come from the core of the earth. He inhales the pungent, subterranean fragrance. He has come here to drink of this secret water.     
​  Preparing to drink, he kneels and cups his right hand. But before he does he takes time to relish the moment of sweet culmination. Then he looks at the surface, at the point where he intends to plunge his hand and sees something which freezes that hand in the air.
   He sees life in the pool.