By Fire, By Water (46 page)

“Your Highness,” he began, still looking toward the horizon. “All this talk of distances and titles is academic.”

The queen turned to him, puzzled. “What on earth are you trying to say, Señor Santángel?”

“Someone will go there, Your Highness.”

“Are we deliberately being obscure?”

He continued looking out over the darkening landscape. “If I were to underwrite Señor Colón’s voyage, with all the benefits accruing to the Crowns, would you then consider supporting such an expedition?”

The queen’s voice betrayed her astonishment. “If you were, in effect, to pay for it, while offering us all profits?”

The chancellor turned to her. “Yes, my lady.”

The queen looked at him. This man could not be the ambitious, skeptical, cautious courtier she had known. He had changed. “Why would any man of sound mind contemplate doing such a thing?”

Santángel turned back to the landscape. The rainbow had vanished. So had the rain. The sun was declining. Dusk was falling on Iberia. On the horizon, far to the west, the land shone in hues of gold-streaked ocher.

“Because it is time, Your Highness,” muttered the chancellor of Aragon. “Because it must be.”

    
EPILOGUE

The Scattering

I. The Ocean Sea

T
WO MONTHS AFTER
the
Niña
, the
Pinta
, and the
Santa María
set forth from the port of Palos, two merciless months into a farfetched maritime adventure he had never envisioned, Judith’s nephew Levi Migdal trudged up to the
Santa María
’s main deck to fill his eyes with the endless, dark waters, to ask questions of God, to seek solace in the vastness of the world beyond himself, his people, his time, his home. The moon shone brighter and colder than any fire, casting a tapering ray of light over the sea, a ribbon of hope floating upon an immeasurable pool of sadness. A weak, salt-infused breeze wafted over the still waters. The ship creaked with a soft lament. Although the
Niña
and the
Pinta
stood upright less than a mile behind, they looked as desolate and spindly as skeletons.

What was the likelihood that, beyond the ever-receding horizon, they would discover the Indias, the Garden of Eden, or Jerusalem? No community of scholars had supported Colón’s proposition. No one had ever sailed west to the Indias and come back to tell of it.

Levi felt as if he were standing before, or even within, the murky chasm of death itself. As King Solomon had written long before, “Who knows whether the spirit of man goes upward and the spirit of the beast goes down into the earth?” Like the land to the west, if such a place existed, no one had ever returned from Sheol to report of it. All that was said about the boundary of life and what came after, all that the world’s theologians had been trying to prove for centuries, was nothing but futility and a striving after wind.

The Ocean Sea: an immeasurable pool of despair, a reservoir of memories, against which Levi had to struggle every moment in order not to drown. The empty houses of Granada’s Jewish quarter, which had once been his world, staring at him like the abandoned corpses of relatives and friends. His aunt’s face stained with tears as she held him before leaving for the port, and Fez, with Isaac.

Looking out over the endless expanse of water, reflecting on all the change and death he had witnessed, Levi thought of a Hebrew
piyyut
, a meditation on destiny and death, recited on the most holy days of the year, Rosh Hashana and Yom Kippur.

Who shall live and who shall die

Who at the measure of days and who before

Who by fire and who by water

Who by the sword and who by wild beasts

Who shall have rest and who shall go wandering

Who shall be brought low and who shall be raised high
.

As these words flowed through Levi’s memory, he heard the clack of a boot against the deck boards and turned to see the ship’s captain, Cristóbal Colón, standing at the bow, lean and tall, with shoulder-length gray hair and a striking, bulbous nose, looking older than his forty-two years.

Although Levi was a young man and the only hand on this ship who possessed no seafaring skills, Colón treated him with respect, even admiration. Levi was a friend of the chancellor. He also reminded Colón, in some ways, of himself. Like Levi, Colón had once left behind the familiar world of his childhood for a larger world, for the unknown. Like Levi, Colón spoke several languages and had changed his name to match changed circumstances. Like Levi, he possessed a hard-to-place accent and an even harder-to-place identity. Levi kept his faith hidden from the sailors, but alone with the Genoese captain, he translated Hebrew and Aramaic texts with unmistakable reverence.

The captain approached. “Luis de Torres.” He used the Christianized form of Levi’s name. The
Santa María
was considered Castilian soil; no overt Jews were permitted on board. “Tell me frankly, are you one of those who say we’ll never get there, or are you with me?”

Levi looked into his eyes, reflecting the moonlight. “Didn’t you predict we’d reach land weeks ago, Captain?”

“So you are with
them,”
sighed the captain.

“I’m no soothsayer. Will we find India? Will we die at sea? I have no idea.”

Colón nodded and resumed looking over the moony waters.

“And you,” asked Levi. “How can you be so sure about things no one has seen?”

“I never claimed I was,” Colón admitted in a tone he usually reserved for confession.

Confused, Levi looked at him, but the Genoese continued staring out over the waters. “In my deepest heart,” he continued, “I always harbored doubts. So much so, that the outright rejection of my ideas by nearly everyone, it never surprised me.”

“In that case,” Levi wondered aloud, “why did you persevere? Why did you insist on meeting the queen? Why, after she rejected your ideas, did you insist on trying again?”

“Because,” reflected Colón, “I couldn’t tolerate life without this enterprise, this hope, this ambition. Working, eating, sleeping, and then repeating the cycle, with nothing awaiting you at the end but death …” He shook his head.

Levi wondered whether the captain was not already making excuses for his impending failure. “It wasn’t about finding the Indias?”

“It was never just that.”

They both stood silently, looking over the waters, wondering what was to become of them.

II. Fez

A
FTER STRUGGLING
for so many years to provide for a boy not her son and an old man not her father, after sailing to a city she had not chosen, after marrying a man she had not loved, Judith Azoulay found a serene simplicity in the new life thrust upon her by destiny.

She never received word from Levi, nor did she manage to contact Cristóbal Colón to ask for news, but like almost everyone, she learned about the discovery of vast new realms in the west. She heard that Colón left a colony of sailors there. Every night she prayed that wherever Levi was, he was safe.

The fruit of her union with Luis de Santángel, known to all as her child with Isaac Azoulay, was a fine-featured boy with the pale skin, dark hair, and elegant charisma of his Aragonese father. She named him Zion.

In the capital city of Fez, Isaac Azoulay achieved a level of respect that surpassed even his previous reputation in Granada. The sultan, who knew of him through the former vizier of Granada, allotted Azoulay and his family a comfortable residence in the center of town.

Over time, Judith came to love Isaac Azoulay not only for his erudition and wisdom, but also for his gentleness and patience. He never hinted that Zion was not his own son. From the moment he delivered the child, even before he realized he could not father a child of his own, he loved and thanked God for the boy. Nor did he ask who that gentleman was whom he had seen bidding Judith farewell at the harbor.

III. Zaragoza

L
ITTLE BY LITTLE
, Luis de Santángel repopulated his home and office with servants and subordinates. He never came to enjoy, with them, the bond of trust and courage he had developed with Felipe de Almazón. Only with Iancu did he retain a sense of shared tragedy and bitter survival.

He would never again set eyes upon Judith Migdal or hear her voice. He would never meet their child. He did not even know whether they had survived the voyage across the Middle Sea.

Nor would he ever again set foot in a synagogue. Indeed, there were no longer any synagogues in Castile or Aragon. All the synagogues were reconsecrated as churches. Ysabel and Fernando took to boasting that they had “unified” almost all of the Iberian peninsula. At what cost? Santángel asked himself.

Unification meant all of Spain was to speak one language and pray to one God. It meant Luis de Santángel would not be buried with his grandparents, and their parents, and the parents before them. It meant that one day, the great-great grandchildren of
conversos
would harbor no doubts about the purity of their identities, their beliefs, their blood. Unification meant no doubt, no dissent, no debate. It meant forgetting. It meant obliteration.

It also meant that the class of people who posed questions—scholars, astronomers, cartographers, secret agnostics—would not return. The advance of knowledge, especially of knowledge antithetical to the teachings of the Church, had ground to a halt.

Santángel inquired about the conditions surrounding the Jews’ exile. He received terrifying reports of pirate attacks, starvation, Jews sold into slavery, foreign ports refusing entry to ragged boats packed with exiles. He heard stories of wealthy Jews reduced to the condition of beggars. Some realms, however—especially, but not only, in the Islamic world—had welcomed the Jews with open arms.