The Bookman - Lavie Tidhar [66]
...An amazing land! I have never thought to see such wild beauties as the forests of this new land, its strange animals and unknown flora. My notebook is filling up fast with lines of poetry, which I will attempt to structure into an epic narrative poem upon our return. I lie in a hammock on the deck and dream of glory, success following publication, a long life with many women, children and grand-children, at last, rich and old and famous, burial in Westminster Abbey… I smile even as I write this. But it is good to daydream. Our journey is nearly at an end, and has been successful beyond all expectations. We will be welcomed like heroes. I wonder – have we opened up this new world for good? Will the navy sail here now, to take control of this wild continent and its wilder islands, to establish trade missions and new colonies for the glory of Britannia? No doubt. Yet the people of these lands have civilisations of their own, some quite powerful and old. I do not take the Aztecs lightly, nor the others, the [unreadable] who are fierce warriors. Tomorrow we shall stop at Xaymaco, then home.
… The island is like a mirage, a tropical paradise unlike anything I have seen in my travels. Several of the crew disappeared today, seduced by this place, and I doubt they will be back. Amerigo is furious, but there is little he can do. Our priority now is to return and bring back the fortune we have found. The cook brewed xocolatl today – we have all become overly fond – nay, dependent! – on it, and I can only imagine what the response will be like back home! We are all going to be rich beyond our wildest dreams.
Open sea again. The weather is turning, wind building up and slowing us down. There is a storm on the horizon, coming near. Something has been troubling me, something in Amerigo's behaviour… …
I am filled with foreboding. The nature of the [unreadable] I have found out piecemeal, first from the Mexicas and later from the Arawak, although the stories are pervasive all around the Carib Sea. They concern an island which has no name, and they are told in whispers, though what they describe must have happened – if it happened at all – beyond any living man's memory. This is the way I heard the story for the first time, from a priest of Atlacamani, the goddess of storms. It tells of an epic journey – not unlike our own, perhaps – of a people called the Toltec, who lived in this part of the world and had built a flotilla of ships to go and explore the ocean, to find new lands and bring back their treasures. The fleet was not gone far (which I take to mean it was still in the Carib Sea or only recently outside it) when night – the priest was very specific on this, though I do wonder if it isn't some sort of an allegory – became day. Brightness washed the decks of the ships and the wind stood still, so that the ships found themselves stranded in midsea, and there was much panic. Not only light came from the skies, but heat, and as the sailors raised their heads to the heavens they saw a shooting star, growing in the skies as it plummeted down to earth. It grew so large and so bright that they had to shield their eyes against it. Many died that night. The star fell down and – by luck, or divine intervention – landed not in open water but on a small, remote island that was [unreadable[ from the ships. The resultant explosion blinded many of the men, and many died later, in months and years to come, of blisters and growths and sickness. The ships did not attempt to approach the island. The flotilla turned and sailed back from that place, which is known to this day only as the Place of Sickness. This is what the priest told me, and it is an old tale, more of a ghost story to be told around the fire than any exact account of a long-gone event. Yet I wonder… and so, I fear, does Amerigo.
… I should perhaps record the other