Pastwatch Page 7

  Father doesn’t matter to them, thought Cristoforo. They meet in his house because they must keep their meeting secret, but he himself is nothing to them.

  The meeting ended soon after: the decision was to go on the attack in two days. As soon as the gentlemen had left and Father closed the door, Mother sailed past Cristoforo and pushed herself into Father’s face. “What do you mean, you fool? If anyone wants to harm the rightful Doge, they’ll have to strike down Domenico Colombo first!—What nonsense! When did you become a soldier? Where is your fine sword? How many duels have you fought? Or are you thinking this will be a brawl in a tavern, and you have only to knock together the heads of a couple of drunks, and the battle will be won? Do you care nothing for our children, that you plan to leave them fatherless?”

  “A man has honor,” said Father.

  Cristoforo wondered, What is Father’s honor, when his greatest friend despises the offer of his life?

  “Your honor will have your children on the street in rags.”

  “My honor made me keeper of the Olivella Gate for four years. You liked living in our fine house then, didn’t you?”

  “That time is over,” said Mother. “Blood will flow, and it will not be Adorno blood.”

  “Don’t be too sure of that,” said Father. He stormed upstairs. Mother burst into tears of rage and frustration. The argument was over.

  But Cristoforo wasn’t satisfied. He waited as Mother calmed herself by pulling the extra spools away from the table and putting the cloth back on it, so customers could look at it and so it would stay clean. When he judged he could speak without being screamed at, he said, “How do gentlemen learn to be gentlemen?”

  She glared at him. “They’re born that way,” she said. “God made them gentlemen.”

  “But why can’t we learn to talk the way they do?” Cristoforo asked. “I don’t think it would be hard.” Cristoforo imitated the refined voice of de Portobello, saying, “You were never one who punished a man for saying what he believed to be the truth.”

  Mother came to him and slapped him hard across the face. It stung, and even though Cristoforo had long since stopped crying when he was punished, the sheer surprise of it more than the sting made tears leap from his eyes.

  “Don’t ever let me hear you putting on airs like that again, Cristoforo!” she shouted. “Are you too good for your father? Do you think that honking like a goose will make you grow feathers?”

  In his anger, Cristoforo shouted back at her. “My father is as good a man as any of them. Why shouldn’t his son learn to be a gentleman?”

  Almost she slapped him again, for having dared to answer her back. But then she caught herself, and actually heard what he had said. “Your father is as good as any of them,” she said. “Better!”

  Cristoforo gestured toward the fine fabrics spread across the table. “There is the cloth—why can’t Father dress like a gentleman? Why can’t he speak the way they do, and dress like them, and then the Doge would honor him!”

  “The Doge would laugh at him,” said Mother. “And so would everyone else. And then if he kept on trying to act the gentleman, one of them would come along and put a rapier through your father’s heart, for daring to be such an upstart.”

  “Why would they laugh at him, if they don’t laugh at these other men for dressing and talking the way they do?”

  “Because they really are gentlemen, and your father is not.”

  “But if it isn’t their clothing and their language . . . Is there something in their blood? They didn’t look stronger than Father. They had weak arms, and most of them were fat.”

  “Father is stronger than they are, of course. But they carry swords.”

  “Then Father should buy a sword!”

  “Who would sell a sword to a weaver!” said Mother, laughing. “And what would Father do with it? He has never wielded a sword in his life. He’d cut off his own fingers!”

  “Not if he practiced,” said Cristoforo. “Not if he learned.”

  “It isn’t the sword that makes a man a gentleman,” said Mother. “Gentlemen are born as the children of gentlemen, that’s all. Your father’s father wasn’t a gentleman, and so he isn’t.”

  Cristoforo thought about this for a moment. “Aren’t we all descended from Noah, after the flood? Why are the children of one family gentlemen, and the children of Father’s family aren’t? God made us all.”

  Mother laughed bitterly. “Oh, is that what the priests taught you? Well, you should see them bowing and scraping to the gentlemen while they piss on the rest of us. They think that God likes gentlemen better, but Jesus Christ didn’t act that way. He cared nothing for gentlemen!”

  “So what gives them the right to look down at Father?” demanded Cristoforo, and against his will his eyes again filled with tears.

  She regarded him for a moment, as if deciding whether to tell him the truth. “Gold and dirt,” she said.

  Cristoforo didn’t understand.

  “They have gold in their treasure boxes,” said Mother, “and they own land. That’s what makes them gentlemen. If we had huge swatches of land out in the country, or if we had a box filled with gold in the attic, then your father would be a gentleman and no one would laugh at you if you learned to talk the fancy way they do and wore clothing made of this.” She held the trailing end of a bolt of cloth against Cristoforo’s chest. “You’d make a fine gentleman, my Cristoforo.” Then she dropped the fabric and laughed and laughed and laughed.

  Finally Cristoforo left the room. Gold, he thought. If Father had gold, then those other men would listen to him. Well, then—I will get him gold.

  One of the men at the meeting must have been a traitor, or perhaps one of them spoke carelessly, where a traitorous servant overheard, but somehow the Adornos got word of the plans of the Fieschi, and when Pietro and his two bodyguards showed up beside the cylindrical towers of the Sant’ Andrea Gate where the rendezvous was supposed to take place, they were set upon by a dozen of the Adornos. Pietro was dragged from his horse and struck in the head with a mace. They left him for dead as they ran away.

  The shouting could be heard in the Colombo house as clearly as if it had happened next door, which it almost had—they lived scarcely a hundred yards from the Sant’ Andrea Gate. They heard the first shouts of the men, and Pietro’s voice as he cried out, “Fieschi! To me, Fieschi!”

  At once Father took his heavy staff from its place by the fire and ran into the street. Mother got to the front of the house too late to stop him. Screaming and crying, she gathered the children and the apprentices into the back of the house while the journeymen stood guard at the front door. There in the gathering darkness they heard the tumult and shouting, and then Pietro’s screaming. For he had not been killed outright, and now in his agony he howled for help in the night.

  “Fool,” whispered Mother. “If he keeps screeching like that, he’ll tell all the Adornos that they didn’t kill him and they’ll come back and finish him off.”

  “Will they kill Father?” asked Cristoforo.

  The younger children began to cry.

  “No,” said Mother, but Cristoforo could tell that she was not sure.

  Perhaps she could sense his skepticism. “All fools,” she said. “All men are fools. Fighting over who gets to rule Genova—what does that matter? The Turk is in Constantinople! The heathens have the Holy Sepulchre in Jerusalem! The name of Christ is no longer spoken in Egypt, and these little boys are squabbling over who gets to sit on a fancy chair and call himself the Doge of Genova? What is the honor of Pietro Fregoso compared to the honor of Jesus Christ? What is it to possess the palace of the Doge when the land where the Blessed Virgin walked in her garden, where the angel came to her, is in the hands of circumcised dogs? If they want to kill somebody, let them liberate Jerusalem! Let them free Constantinople! Let them shed blood to redeem the honor of the Son of God!”

  “That’s what I will fight for,” said Cristoforo.

  “Do
n’t fight!” said one of his sisters. “They’d kill you.”

  “I’d kill them first.”

  “You’re very small, Cristoforo,” his sister said.

  “I won’t always be small.”

  “Hush,” said Mother. “This is all nonsense. The son of a weaver doesn’t go on Crusade.”

  “Why not?” said Cristoforo. “Would Christ refuse my sword?”

  “What sword?” said Mother scornfully.

  “I’ll have a sword one day,” said Cristoforo. “I’ll be a gentleman!”

  “How, when you have no gold?”

  “I’ll get gold!”

  “In Genova? As a weaver? As long as you live, you’ll be the son of Domenico Colombo. No one will give you gold, and no one will call you a gentleman. Now be silent, or I’ll pinch your arm.”

  It was a worthy threat, and all the children knew well enough to obey when Mother uttered it.

  A couple of hours later, Father came home. The journeymen almost didn’t let him in, just from his knocking. Not until he cried out in anguish, “My lord is dead! Let me in!” did they unbar the door.

  He staggered inside just as the children raced after Mother into the front room. Father was covered with blood, and Mother screamed and embraced him and then searched him for wounds.

  “It’s not my blood,” he said in anguish. “It’s the blood of my Doge! Pietro Fregoso is dead! The cowards set on him and pulled him from his horse and struck him in the head with a mace!”

  “Why are you covered with his blood, Nico!”

  “I carried him to the doors of the palace of the Doge. I carried him to the place where he ought to be!”

  “Why would you do that, you fool!”

  “Because he told me to! I came to him and he was crying out and covered with blood and I said, ‘Let me take you to your physicians, let me take you to your house, let me find the ones who did this and kill them for you,’ and he said to me, ‘Domenico, take me to the palace! That’s where the Doge should die—in the palace, like my father!’ So I carried him there, in my own arms, and I didn’t care if the Adornos saw us! I carried him there and he was in my arms when he died! I was his true friend!”

  “If they saw you with him, they’ll find you and kill you!”

  “What does it matter?” said Father. “The Doge is dead!”

  “It matters to me,” said Mother. “Get those clothes off.” She turned to the journeymen and began giving orders. “You—get the children to the back of the house. You—have the apprentices draw water and heat it for a bath. You—when I get these clothes off him, burn them.”

  The other children obeyed the journeyman and fled to the back of the house, but Cristoforo did not. He watched as his mother undressed his father, covering him with kisses and curses the whole time. Even after she led him into the courtyard for his bath, even as the stench of the burning bloody clothing came into the house, Cristoforo stayed there in the front room. He was on watch, guarding the door.

  Or so the old accounts of that night all said. Columbus was on watch, to keep his family safe. But Diko knew that this was not all that was going through Cristoforo’s mind. No, he was making his decision. He was setting before him the terms of his future greatness. He would be a gentleman. Kings and queens would treat him with respect. He would have gold. He would conquer kingdoms in the name of Christ.

  He must have known even then that to accomplish all of this, he would have to leave Genova. As his mother had said: As long as he lived in this city, he would be the son of Domenico the weaver. From the next morning he bent his life toward achieving his new goals. He began to study—languages, history—with such vigor that the monks who were teaching him commented on it. “He has caught the spirit of scholarship,” they said, but Diko knew that it wasn’t learning for its own sake. He had to know languages to travel abroad in the world. He had to know history to know what was in the world when he ventured into it.

  And he had to know how to sail. Every chance he got, Cristoforo was down at the docks, listening to the sailors, questioning them, learning what all the crewmen did. Later he focused on the navigators, plying them with wine when he could afford it, simply demanding answers when he could not. Eventually it would get him aboard a ship, and then another; he turned down no chance to sail, and did any work that was asked of him, so that he would know all that a weaver’s son could hope to learn about the sea.

  Diko made her report on Cristoforo Colombo, on the moment when he made his decision. As always, her father praised it, criticizing only minor points. But she knew by now that his praise could conceal serious criticism. When she challenged him, he wouldn’t tell her what his criticism was. “I say that this report is a good one,” he told her. “Now leave me alone.”

  “There’s something wrong with it,” Diko said, “and you’re not telling me.”

  “It’s a well-written report. It has nothing wrong except the points I told you.”

  “Then you disagree with my conclusion. You don’t think this was what made Cristoforo decide to be great.”

  “Decide to be great?” asked Father. “Yes, I think this is almost certainly the point in his life where he made that decision.”

  “Then what’s wrong with it!” she shouted.

  “Nothing!” he shouted back.

  “I’m not a child!”

  He looked at her in consternation. “You aren’t?”

  “You’re humoring me and I’m tired of it!”

  “All right,” he said. “Your report is excellent and observant. He certainly decided on the night you pinpointed, and for the reasons that you laid out, that he would pursue gold and greatness and the glory of God. All that is very good. But there is not one breath of a hint in anything you reported on that would tell us why and how he decided that he would achieve those goals by sailing west into the Atlantic.”

  It struck as brutally as the slap that Cristoforo’s mother had given him, and it brought the same tears to her eyes, even though there was no physical blow involved.

  “I’m sorry,” said Father. “You said you were not a child.”

  “I’m not,” she said. “And you’re wrong.”

  “I am?”

  “My project is to find when the decision for greatness was made, and that’s what I found. It’s your project and Mother’s project to figure out when Columbus decided to go west.”

  Father looked at her in surprise. “Well, yes, I suppose so. It’s certainly something we need to know.”

  “So there’s nothing wrong with my report for my project, just because it doesn’t happen to answer the question that’s bothering you in yours.”

  “You’re right,” said Father.

  “I know!”

  “Well, now I know, too. I withdraw the criticism. Your report is complete and acceptable and I accept it. Congratulations.”

  But she didn’t go away.

  “Diko, I’m working,” he said.

  “I’ll find it for you,” she said.

  “Find what?”

  “Whatever it was that caused Cristoforo to sail west.”

  “Finish your own project, Diko,” said Father.

  “You don’t think I can, do you?”

  “I’ve been over the recordings of Columbus’s life, and so has your mother, and so have countless other scholars and scientists. You think you’ll find what none of them ever found?”

  “Yes,” said Diko.

  “Well,” said Father. “I think we’ve just isolated your decision for greatness.”

  He smiled at her, a crooked little smile. She assumed that he was teasing her. But she didn’t care. He might think he was joking, but she would make his joke turn real. Had he and Mother and countless others pored over all the old Tempoview recordings of Columbus’s life? Very well, then, Diko would stop looking at recordings at all. She would go and look directly at his life, and not with the Tempoview, either. The TruSite II would be her tool. She didn’t ask for permission, and she didn�
��t ask for help. She simply took over a machine that wasn’t used at night, and adjusted the schedule of her life to fit the hours when the machine was hers to use. Some wondered whether she really ought to be using the most up-to-date machines—after all, she wasn’t actually a member of Pastwatch. Her training was at best informal. She was merely the child of watchers, and yet she was using a machine that one normally got access to after years of study.

  Those who had those doubts, however, seeing the set of her face, seeing how hard she worked and how quickly she learned to use the machine, soon lost any desire to question her right to do it. It occurred to some of them that this was the human way, after all. You went to school to learn to do a trade that was different from your parents’ work. But if you were going into the family business, you learned it from childhood up. Diko was as much a watcher as anyone else, and by all indications a good one. And those who had at first thought of questioning her or even stopping her instead notified the authorities that here was a novice worth observing. A recording was started, watching all that Diko did. And soon she had a silver tag on her file: Let this one go where she wants.

  4

  _____

  Kemal

  The Santa Maria sank on a reef on the north shore of Hispaniola, due to Columbus’s foolhardiness in sailing at night and the inattention of the pilot. But the Niña and the Pinta did not sink; they sailed home to report to Europe on the vast lands awaiting them to the west, triggering a westward flood of immigrants, conquerors, and explorers that wouldn’t stop for five hundred years. If Columbus was to be stopped, the Niña and the Pinta could not return to Spain.

  The man who sank them was Kemal Akyazi, and the path that brought him to Tagiri’s project to change history was a long and strange one.

  Kemal Akyazi grew up within a few miles of the ruins of Troy; from his boyhood home above Kumkale he could see the waters of the Dardanelles, the narrow strait that connects the waters of the Black Sea with the Aegean. Many a war had been fought on both sides of that strait, one of which had produced the great epic of Homer’s Iliad.