The Golden Gate, page 23
As Rodrigo shaved away curls of linden wood from his tiny ship’s flanks a bronzed hand pointed at it. “What do you make there, chief gunner?”
Rodrigo turned and saw, laying out his own mat alongside, the navigator known only as Mano. Mano was a new addition to the San Lorenzo’s complement, employed seventeen days earlier while the great navy refitted at La Coruna. Mano was said to possess extraordinary navigation skill in general, but in particular he had experience of the great Atlantic Ocean, upon which the San Lorenzo was then about to embark.
The turbulent Atlantic ill-suited the low freeboard of a Neapolitan galleass, which was built to rule the calmer Mediterranean. The San Lorenzo’s oar ports were so close to her waterline that even gentle swells could flood her lower deck to the waists of her rowers. It was said that the San Lorenzo’s master, Don Hugo de Moncada, hoped that experienced crew members like Mano would mitigate the San Lorenzo’s design shortcomings.
Mano’s new shipmates remarked that whatever his experience he moved with a hummingbird’s unpredictable speed, and spoke barely more often and scarcely louder than one. He was neither so fair in complexion as a Spaniard nor so brown as a moor. He lacked a moor’s broad features and his face was as smooth and as hairless as a page’s, though his dark, weary eyes belied a page’s naiveté.
Rodrigo raised his carving and turned it in his hand as he answered Mano’s question. “I am fashioning a token to receive God’s blessing upon this ship and upon us all.”
Mano pointed across the Channel. “If the English are such vile heretics as King Phillip says, then has God not already blessed this enterprise ten times over?”
“They are so vile. The English deny even the Holy Father’s calendar. For them the seventh day of August arrives only ten days hence.”
“And such differences are cause to spill blood?”
“We have more strenuous differences with the English than their calendar. Their so-called navy are nothing but seagoing cutpurses. Had Drake the pirate not abandoned his pursuit of us in order to take the Rosario as his prize last week, the English could already have scattered this formation, like dogs among gulls. An Englishman will shed more innocent blood for treasure than for God.”
Mano stared west into the dark. “I have seen Spaniards spill innocent blood for treasure in the name of their god.”
“Mano, have you made the passage to the New World, then?”
Mano nodded as he stared, then yawned. “I know little of this channel or of its currents or of the nation for which it is named. But I have made the passage to this world, and back again to the new, so often that I am weary.”
Rodrigo patted his new shipmate’s shoulder as he lay back on the platform and closed his eyes. Rodrigo said, “Tonight you may rest. We both may. Neither Moncada nor God will require your hand on the astrolabe or mine on the shot gauges before dawn.”
* * *
“Rodrigo!” Mano the navigator pounded Rodrigo’s shoulder with one hand.
Rodrigo sat up on the platform, stared in the direction where the navigator pointed, and felt the wind that remained in Rodrigo’s and Mano’s faces. That wind now bore toward them, through the moonlit night, eight ships at full sail. Two were aflame. The other six were dark or showed faint lights.
Rodrigo whispered, “Hellburners.”
“What?”
“I warned you the English are demons. They are setting fireships among us. The Dutch heretics set only two fireships on us in the Scheldt and eight hundred Spaniards perished.”
Mano said, “They approach in the night like ghosts.”
Rodrigo pointed at the fireships as their white sails drew closer, and in that moment flames crept up the rigging of a third ship and her sails came alight. “They approach like ghosts because they are ghosts. Their tillers are lashed and their crews have made away in boats, leaving lit fuses burning. The English have laden those ships with canvas and hemp and rope and tar and pitch and soaked the lot, and the ships’ decks themselves, in oil. The ships’ guns are powdered and double shotted. When they are among us the heat and flame will cause them to discharge into us in all directions as if each fireship were a great bomb and each ship in this navy a box of tinder.”
From the afterdeck Don Hugo shouted orders as the full crew were roused.
A pinnace drew alongside the San Lorenzo, and its crew shouted up to them the orders from the Duke of Medina Sidonia that all ships of his navy should cut or discard their anchor cables and make away from the fireships’ path.
The pinnace continued on to the next vessel as the San Lorenzo’s boatswain called to Mano and Rodrigo to assist him.
But, by the time they reached the boatswain, he had swung an axe and severed the galleass’s main anchor. As the cable slithered down into the dark sea like a murdered serpent, the boatswain muttered, “The English call them Hellburners. But it will be these lost anchors that will play hell with us all in the next heavy weather.”
As Rodrigo watched, smaller Spanish vessels grappled the two most violently burning fireships and towed them away from the fleet’s core.
In haste to maneuver in the darkness, the San Lorenzo’s helmsman fouled her rudder on another ship’s anchor cable.
Within minutes, the boatswain had pronounced the rudder’s damage too severe to repair at sea. Don Hugo had given orders to make for Calais, maneuvering by oars alone.
* * *
An hour after Mano had roused him, Mano and Rodrigo stood on their platform and watched as the six remaining fireships drifted, ablaze but harmless, to ground on the shore of France and burn themselves out. In the opposite direction the lanterns of countless Spanish ships wandered in the English Channel, as aimless as fireflies in the darkness, as the Great and Fortunate Navy dissolved into pandemonium.
* * *
At dawn Rodrigo and Mano remained on the forward platform and watched as the English raced to overtake the slowly-rowed San Lorenzo. The wounded galleass crept toward Calais borne by the strokes of the three hundred heretics and lesser criminals who rowed her. As the English drew closer, the rowers were exhorted to raise their effort.
A sudden great wrenching and grinding slowed the San Lorenzo’s modest progress so abruptly that Rodrigo and Mano were pitched forward onto the prow, beneath the forward platform.
Shouts and screams came from aft and below them.
Rodrigo rose from prone to his knees and felt a great lump begin to form on his forehead. He heard Mano curse as the other man moved his own shoulder.
Mano said, “We have grounded on a sandbar.”
Rodrigo rubbed his forehead. “Perhaps as the tide comes in it will refloat her. And if the English come for us she may not be able to maneuver but we shall greet them with fifty cannons worth of Spanish shot.”
Mano shook his head. “The tide ebbs and will continue to ebb for a considerable time. Soon she will sink further onto the sand and list further to starboard. Your starboard guns will be smothered, your port guns will point at the sky like fowling pieces, and your fore and aft guns will be immovable.” Mano reached down and lifted an object that lay on the deck, then held it up between them. It was Rodrigo’s unfinished votive carving, which had fallen, as the two of them had, upon the impact of the grounding.
Mano raised his eyebrows in the dim light. “Perhaps you should have had this blessed before we left port.”
He held the votive model out to Rodrigo, but Rodrigo pushed it away and snorted. “Throw it at the English when they board us. Then it will have been of some use.”
* * *
Rodrigo watched the English come for the San Lorenzo, but not in the manner expected. An entire squadron against one, they were like the scavenging dogs he had predicted them to be. As Mano had predicted, the tide had indeed gone out and the San Lorenzo listed so badly that her cannon were unusable.
The English ships drew more water than a galleass. Seeing the San Lorenzo’s predicament, the English therefore did not risk grounding their own vessels in the shallows. Instead, they stood off, firing cannon at the San Lorenzo from long range, and without effect.
The English then launched longboats, carrying marksmen. When the longboats drew within musket range they began firing upon the wounded galleass.
Rodrigo and Mano sheltered behind the forward platform and watched while Don Hugo directed the San Lorenzo’s marines in the return of the English fire. The marines outnumbered the English in the longboats, and fired down into the unprotected longboats from behind the cover afforded by the elevated starboard rail. In this way, the English were held at bay for the greater part of an hour, and many were wounded.
Rodrigo said, “Perhaps they will abandon this prize, rejoin the pursuit of the remainder of the navy, and we shall be spared.”
Mano said, “If their aim is to save England, they will rejoin the pursuit. If, as you say, they pursue treasure, Don Hugo will oblige them. I think he plays on their greed to purchase time so that Medina Sidonia may reassemble his navy. Don Hugo is a brave and clever man.”
In that moment an Englishman leapt from the nearest boat, so that he stood waist-deep in the sea with his feet firmly planted on bottom. Another Englishman handed a loaded musket down to him over the boat’s rail, and the man in the water raised it to his newly steady shoulder, aimed, then fired.
The Englishman’s ball struck Don Hugo full on the face, and he crumpled onto the afterdeck.
Mano ran in a crouch down the long fly bridgeway that overlooked the rowing decks and allowed passage fore to aft. Rodrigo followed. By the time Mano reached Don Hugo, the flagship’s surgeon already knelt over the stricken commander of the Squadron of Galleasses, who lay on his back as dark blood pooled around his motionless head.
The surgeon looked up at them and shook his head. “The ball entered his eye and has gone into his brain.”
From the lower decks a great wailing rose.
Not for the fate of the brave and clever Don Hugo de Moncada. The oarsmen trapped below, within the now severely listed galleass, realized that when the tide turned many of their number might perish in the coming flood unless they were released.
In the meanwhile, the leaderless marines began abandoning their firing positions, hurling away their heavy muskets, throwing themselves over the shoreward rail in panic, then wading or swimming for shore as the English boats closed the distance to the San Lorenzo.
Mano disappeared below, and scant moments later oarsmen as well as common sailors began to follow the marines in their high-kneed rush through the shallows to shore.
As the first Englishman’s head appeared above the San Lorenzo’s rail, Rodrigo followed his countrymen in their hundreds in headlong flight toward shore. The English, busy looting their prize, ignored the Spaniards.
A quarter-hour later, Rodrigo slogged ashore, paused calf-deep and panting in the surf, and surveyed the melee. He glimpsed the bronze-skinned figure of Mano, the navigator, darting as nimbly as a hummingbird through the tangle of bedraggled survivors. Many of those were oarsmen whom Mano had liberated from their bondage, and they now had gained both the refuge of the shore and the possibility of a new life.
Mano carried his sea bag in the crook of his arm, and Rodrigo wondered whether it contained, in addition to the navigator’s own sparse possessions, the carved ship that Rodrigo had discarded. Rodrigo also wondered whether, if the little carving was in that bag, the votive would bring Mano better luck in his new life than it had so far brought Rodrigo Sanchez de Vega and the rest of Spain’s Great and Fortunate Navy.
THIRTY-SIX
“Dad! The limo David sent’s outside.” Kate shouted up the stairs of the Boyle home to her father, then turned to check herself out in the foyer’s full-length mirror.
Her dress, purchased earlier in the day, was emerald green and was the only one she had tried on since she stopped swimming that didn’t make her ass look bigger than an Airbus. She faced the mirror, tugged with both hands at the strapless neckline, then bent forward at the waist to simulate the view from Shepard’s eye level.
Her father’s patent leathers thumped down the stairs as he adjusted the collar on the tux he hadn’t worn, so far as Kate recalled, since the last David Powell party he and Mom had attended. Jack Boyle stood beside her in front of the mirror, shot his cuffs, and asked, “Is this thing still okay?”
Kate turned and adjusted his bow tie. “Perfect. A little retro, but so’s the guy in it.”
Her father eyed her cleavage then craned his neck to check the back of her dress. He sighed. “Well, at least your belly button doesn’t show and ‘KISS THIS’ isn’t stamped across your fanny.”
“Mom made me take those back before I even cut the tags off. But she also took my Disney princess costume to Goodwill a long time ago, Dad.”
“Katy, you’ll always be my little princess.” He kissed her forehead, then held the door for her.
As the car’s driver opened its passenger door for them Kate pouted. A parent in the mix really complicated her plans for an evening that could never be shown on the Disney Channel.
* * *
As Kate remembered the Aquatic Park Bathhouse from her Disney princess days, it was a boring, static sideshow among the glitzy and tawdry tourist attractions that peppered San Francisco’s waterfront.
Tonight, as the hired car David Powell had sent for them inched forward in the dropoff line to the bathhouse’s doors the place finally was dressed up like Cinderella’s castle.
And it was under siege.
Demonstrators lined Beach Street three deep for the last hundred yards to the bathhouse, shaking fists and pumping signs demanding that the Aquatic Park Senior Center be returned to the bathhouse.
Whump.
A thrown something struck the limo’s roof, Kate winced, then orange glop oozed down the window and blurred her view. She shouted behind the glass at the crowd, “You assholes!”
She turned to her father. “Why does David bother doing this over and over?”
Her dad shrugged. “Katy, you’ll never get a coach if you stop buying pumpkins.”
Once the limo glided inside the barricades, it left the crowds behind and the bathhouse, its exterior floodlit, gleamed like a palace again. Of course, the footmen who greeted them were parking valets wearing crooked clip-on bowties, and portly park rangers wanded everybody for metal.
Inside the bathhouse building more National Park Service Rangers patrolled in their forest-green uniforms, hands behind their backs, smiling and nodding like Walmart greeters in funny hats, while they waited for somebody to ask them questions.
The party spilled into every quarter of the bathhouse’s top three public floors. On the entry floor a string quartet played, while couples dressed for a night at the opera wandered, backgrounded by pastel art deco wall murals, painted before even Kate’s father had been born. The partygoers sipped white wine and stuffed their cheeks with hors d’ oeuvres, passed on silver trays by waitstaff wearing white waistcoats.
When the guests weren’t drinking and chipmunking bacon-wrapped scallops, they bent over tiny round tables draped in pressed white cloths, sprinkled among the bathhouse’s sparse maritime exhibits. On the tables stood cards that described “silent auction” donations like condos on St. Bart’s offered for weeks when it always rained, luxury boxes for games pitting the Warriors against whoever was in last place, and New Age Discovery weekends.
Kate said, “Dad, this sucks.”
“What did you expect? David selling Girl Scout cookies for ten grand a box? He tried to have boat rides to jazz it up.”
“Cookies and boat rides. Groovy.”
“Katy these boats are antiques.”
“Exactly.” Kate spotted Shepard’s head, adrift above a sea of bald and tiara’d ones, and touched her father’s arm. “Gotta go. Dad, go find Julia Madison.”
“Why?”
“From what you told me this afternoon, I think she’s here to sell you her cookies.”
* * *
Shepard stood looking lost, with his tuxedoed back to her and a stem of white wine in his right hand.
She touched his arm. He turned, his eyes lit and he stared. “You look beautiful.”
“Thank you.” She turned for him. “It’s probably the only dress in here that the wearer hemmed herself. These people are old money. My mother was old school.”
“I take it this crowd doesn’t impress the Boyles.”
Kate shrugged. “My dad says the principal value of an Ivy League education to an ordinary person is demystification of the rich.”
Kate stood back, looked Shepard up and down, then touched his jacket’s sleeve. “You in a tux does impress me. You look like a secret agent.”
Ben frowned, then nodded at another broad-shouldered man who stood alone with his back against the wall opposite them. “I’m the only secret agent in here who’s not packing. I haven’t seen so many jacket bulges and earpieces in one place since I carried Petrie’s briefcase at a meeting in the West Wing.”
Kate glanced around and counted three more private security men failing to blend in. “Don’t get your paranoia in a wad. The mob outside’s lukewarm for San Francisco. And terrorists don’t attack the rich. They attack soft targets who toil for the rich. The best way to terrorize this crowd would be a two thousand point drop in the Dow.” Kate snagged a white wine stem glass off one passing tray, then a canape off another. She hadn’t eaten or drunk anything all day, which she was sure made her look a half-size thinner. She swallowed half the wine in a gulp. “So, how’s your day been, Shepard?”
“Busy. Petrie’s always eager to work to his staff’s last breath.”
A server wearing a white waistcoat passed by holding a silver tray and Ben plucked a cracker from it, then chewed.
“Shepard, that’s caviar. You won’t—”
He chewed, swallowed, then cocked his head. “Osetra. But still good.”
Kate’s jaw dropped.
Ben shrugged. “Traveling with Petrie has its upside.”
