Arturo Serrano

TO CLIMATES UNKNOWN

AN ALTERNATE HISTORY OF A WORLD WITHOUT AMERICA

To the memory of Joshua Malette

God does not command that some people fall into rivers, nor does He arrange the causal link from which those deaths proceed. But He foresees such events, and allows them for His own goals.

Luis de Molina, Concord Between Human Freedom and Divine Foreknowledge

Does it matter much if some nameless sailor drowns in a river?

Cicero, On Fate

Prologue

Afternoon, April 4 (Julian), 1581

London

Sixteen-year-old apprentice sailor William Adams exited the shipyard where he worked at Limehouse, rowed a boat across the Thames, and headed to the Royal Navy docks in Deptford, where already an adoring multitude was gathering to watch the ceremonial mooring of the Golden Hind and cheer its captain, England’s newest hero Francis Drake. The bravest of explorers to his countrymen, no better than a thirsty suckerfish to Spain, the man was equal measures loved at home and almost universally despised abroad. Both sentiments were born of one divisive fact: the world had only so much gold and silver, and a pound of it the Spanish didn’t take became a pound in England’s coffers. For a boy of William’s age, the tales of raided galleons and newly claimed possessions for the Crown made Drake a paragon of sailors. But for some in high positions, he was an unbridled, reckless, dangerously independent man.

The fact that Queen Elizabeth refused to recognize King Philip’s claim to any of the riches of America was not, in either’s eyes, sufficient reason to disrupt diplomacy, but it was clear that Drake had crossed a line. He had returned with treasures pillaged from the Spanish fleet, more gold than England knew existed, taken by a thief from other, no less greedy thieves, and now Elizabeth had trouble on her hands. Though Drake’s adventures had inflamed the nation’s sense of pride, to openly avow a plunderer would send a risky message to Madrid. Ambassador Mendoza had demanded that the loot be restituted to the Spanish Crown, and there were lords in London who agreed with him, but it was rumored that the Queen made bigger calculations. She could not permit the Popish heretics to flourish unopposed, and any chance to strike at Spain’s ambitions was of use to her. With Drake back home in London, all were holding their collective breath to know what would become of him, and William Adams wanted, more than anything, to tell his children he’d been there, among the witnesses, as history occurred.

By order of the Queen, the Golden Hind had been conveyed to Deptford Creek for exhibition, to create an everlasting monument to national panache. A gauntlet had been thrown to Spain, and Londoners were thrilled with having no idea what would happen next. The massive scene in Deptford, lit up by the presence of the man himself aboard his ship, appeared to them to be a foretaste of the future.

William joined the celebration just as Drake saluted his admirers, fully knowing where he stood: this was a neighborhood of seamen. Everyone acclaimed the captain of the first successful circumnavigation of the world. A minute passed, and gradually the claps and cries of jubilation ceased. A murmur grew among the crowd, and William didn’t know which way to look; it seemed that something of the maximum importance had occurred. They pushed him sideways, which obstructed momentarily his view, but when the movement of the people ceased, the reason for the sudden relocation made itself so clear his jaw fell open, and the shock debarred him, for the briefest moment, from remembering to bow his head.

It was the Queen.

Behind her followed an increasing retinue of courtiers William hadn’t heard about; more boats were still arriving at the shore. The thought amused him that the whole procession had presumably traversed the streets of London, advertising their intentions to the passersby, to be unceremoniously detained by water at the place that mattered. One by one they reached the ship, admiring its magnificent construction and imagining the penuries it had endured, but William sensed they didn’t feel as strongly as he did about the life for which he was laboriously training. Not for them the secrets of the sea. He would, one day, discover lands beyond the borders of the known cartography; survive whatever storm it pleased the gods to throw his way; and at the end of his adventures, dock his ship right there, in view of all his fellow sailors, and accept the accolades of an entire kingdom for the kind of exploits from which legends would for centuries be born. One day he’d be like Captain Drake, and it would be the nobles’ turn to step aside for him.

However, on that fourth of April, every subject of Her Majesty’s was making way for her: a bridge of planks had been installed between the pier and the famous vessel, and as she began ascending to the deck, the people noticed Drake was unmistakably intimidated by the royal visitation. He was not a stranger to her presence, but it was one thing to secretly negotiate the future of the world, and obviously another to participate in public in whatever this occasion was intended by the Queen to signify. Until that day there’d been no word on her decision; as of yet it was uncertain whether he would be rewarded or beheaded. She was greeted by a very nervous captain, who proceeded to congratulate her on her health, indulged in some rehearsed oration on the oft-repeated story of his journey, and invited her to dine aboard. The ministers and earls and dukes and clergymen who were nearby agreed with pleasure to be fed. They walked toward the ship, and promptly all the people in attendance followed too. Nobility and sailors mingled on the wooden bridge, and William went with them; he had been wishing for a chance to personally talk to Drake, but all around him were so many heads and arms and bodies that he found it hard to breathe. As people kept arriving from behind, they started pushing forward. William disappeared amid the mass of curious spectators. He found himself constricted by the heavy bosom of a lady at his back, and by the bricklike muscles of a giant man in front of him. They knew to shut their mouths before Her Majesty, so he heard all but couldn’t see a thing.

An hour seemed to pass. It took at least that much for William’s ears to pick a voice that sounded like the Queen’s.

“You have Our thanks for this exceedingly stupendous banquet,” she began.

It seemed they had already finished with the food, and William wondered how much longer he would have to stand immobile in the crowd, not seeing anything. He was exhausted from prolonged tiptoeing. Once or twice he tried to jump, to no avail. Dismayed, he hung his head and groaned. His lowered gaze was now reflected in the water of the creek.

Elizabeth was talking still. “Alas, We must discuss important business.”

Everyone suppressed a gasp, and William thought he heard a chain of whispers saying that the Queen had drawn a sword.

“The King of Spain demands that We cut off your head,” she said so casually that no one dared to blink. “We order you to kneel.”

The air that separated William from the scene was heavy with anticipation. He was desperate to catch a glimpse of the unfolding history mere steps ahead of him, but every soul in Deptford strived to do the same, and all that reached him was the spreading rumor that the French ambassador had grabbed the sword. That raised a dozen questions more in William’s head, but he was given little time for thought, because what they heard next was Queen Elizabeth announcing, “Rise, Sir Francis Drake,” at which the multitude erupted in applause. Poor William jumped repeatedly to try to see what had just happened, but the waving arms and clapping hands were getting in the way. He jumped again, more strongly, avid for a face, a word, a gesture to recount, a shred of proof that he had lived that day, or any piece of story to embellish afterwards; he jumped once more, not wishing to return to his acquaintances without at least a private fact that no one else had noticed, some elusive, insignificant detail he could repeat and brag about for years; he jumped despite the little space he occupied; he jumped, not caring that he bothered those who stood beside him on the bridge; he jumped again, with more intensity this time, as if it was his only opportunity to do a thing of consequence in all his days; and after one additional attempt his weight and that of dozens of onlookers broke the bridge. The water splashed ridiculously; bodies fell on bodies, crushing faces, twisting limbs, while William, at the bottom of the river, strived beneath the human pile to hold his breath, exerting arms and legs in breaking free, but people had begun to fight each other fruitlessly, and in the same inevitable way that motion follows motion, someone stepped on someone else, an ankle slipped, a shoulder struck a jaw, and William hit his head against the river floor and knew no more.

It was chaos. People who had just embarrassed themselves in the way most guaranteed to never be forgotten were clumsily helping one another climb out to the pier, but it was impossible to maneuver the farthingales, the aiguillettes, the perukes, the supportasses, the peascod bellies, the shoe roses, the gable hoods; their attempts to help their muddied Highnesses only threw them back into the creek. From the deck of the Golden Hind, all matters of state hopelessly forgotten for the rest of the day, the newly knighted Francis Drake watched in mute astonishment the absurdity of the whole affair, and his eyes were drawn to the rippling surface of the water and the blurry image of a London turned upside down, which the courtiers’ frantic movements distorted into meaninglessness, only for the mirror image to redraw itself as the ripples spread.

Noon, September 11 (Julian), 1620

Open sea

Follow those ripples: out of Deptford Creek and down the Thames they go, bouncing against the edges of the river, multiplying as they flow out of London and extend into the sea, squeeze their way through the English Channel and expand in every direction; some crash against the shores of Tripoli and bounce back to colder waters; others are caught in the great currents that circle the world and reach the Far East; others visit hidden beaches in Brazil and splash with the foam up in the air. In their course they meet with one another and give birth to more of their own. Time keeps moving; consequences build up. The unremarkable turns essential and the overlooked is now world-shattering. Follow those ripples, from the death of William Adams and across the centuries until the dawn of the Fifth Age of Fire. That is as far as we can see from where we stand.

This we know: on April 4, 1581, our William did not survive the accident that tainted the otherwise momentous coming of age of a seafaring nation. He did not live to finish, in 1588, his apprenticeship, and gain command of his own vessel; he did not get married that same year. He did not transport supplies to the English warships facing the Spanish assault, and did not later join the merchants of the Barbary Company to carry goods across the deadly route between London and Morocco. He did not spend ten years successfully evading the pirates who might have found good use for a spacious trade ship; let us take it for certain that the less skilled hands of another pilot would not have prevented catastrophe. Thus, on June 24, 1598, our William did not tire of the merchant’s life and sail from Holland on an expedition to the Spice Islands; he did not, after two disastrous years of hunger and misery, become the first Englishman to see Japan. He did not bring to the Shōgun the crucial news that there had been a Reformation; he did not cause him to question his patience with the Jesuits. He did not plead in vain, for the rest of his life, to be allowed to leave for England; he did not die, in desperate exile, on May 16, 1620.

He was, instead, no one.

Now even the years he missed have passed. The currents of consequence are in position. Let them run a little further, just a few more months, until the crisscrossing of ripples settles into the shape of the future.

It is now. It is the Year of Our Lord 1620. It is the Year of the Hijra 1029. It is the sixth year of the reign of Mizunoo II, the eighteenth year of the reign of James I, the thirty-second year of the reign of Christian IV. It is the last year of the reign of Wanli and the first year of the reign of Taichang. It is the Year of the Iron Monkey.

Today, a ship is passing through the North Atlantic on a westward route. A child is bored of looking at the waves, his head supported by a pair of weary hands, his elbows pressed against the gunwale, and his feelings torn between nostalgia, fear, and disillusionment. He never wanted to be here. As much as he would like to understand the why of so much trouble, what he knows, or rather hears his parents say in trembling prayers, is that they are risking everything for graver matters than their life or death; that he, like every other child on board, is Dutch by birth, an Englander by blood, and homeless on account of creed. He travels with a hundred passengers who see themselves as pilgrims headed for the promised land, but only he will have the opportunity to walk on it. Not this year, and not with these companions. His name is Samuel Fuller, and the faith of his parents is going to fail him.

Across the ocean, if his eyes could see that far, he would find a peer. On another ship, finally returning home, a man is scared of truth: he has seen half the world and met the man who owns it. For too many years, he has tried to build a bridge from Japan to Spain, but each side has caused regrettable offenses against the other. He has pled and begged, he has prayed and done penance, but the pride of kings, once wounded, is slow to heal, and that of popes never does. Now he sails back home to deliver a warning that will not be heard. His name is Hasekura Tsunenaga, and his legacy will haunt him.

Far from there, as though no stronger than a fallen ghost, a man is tired of months of lengthy toil. His terribly disgraceful errors killed his crew with cold and scurvy, killing also all the chances he might yet have had of getting home with glory to restore his family’s name and station. Now he navigates a desperate vessel, famished and frostbitten, but in better spirits than a year ago. His name is Jens Eriksen Munk, and although he won’t make it back, he’s anything but finished.

Let us now proceed to the warmer coasts of the great Algiers, where a man has dared to oppose the navies of three empires with a trade ship snatched from the less skilled hands of another pilot. His name, one time, was Ivan de Veenboer, but nowadays he goes by Sulayman, and for his crimes he has very narrowly escaped capture, only to soon inflict it upon innocents.

Today, the ripples that began their journey when our William died are large enough to shake the world. History took a different direction since the moment the plank broke, but what direction has not yet been made evident. The accumulation of consequences is on the verge of reaching visible size. Today, September 11, four ships carry the weight of the world in them, and none will reach its destination.

Part 1: Drift

Do not drag the gods into your accounts of phenomena: leave them happily free from work.

Epicurus, Letter to Pythocles

When in Samothrace, Diagoras was asked how a believer in divine indifference could deny the many pieces of art commemorating those who with divine help had survived the perils of the sea. He replied that none commemorated those who perished.

Cicero, On the Nature of Gods

Evening, October 9 (Gregorian), 1636

Venice

Jan and Brigitte Willemszoon nearly depleted the last of their funds to hire a carriage that night, but after the shameless flattering that had won them this invitation to dine, they couldn’t arrive at the house of rising opera composer Samuele Fulla by such undignified means as their own feet. Artists, after reaching their first taste of fame, leaned toward vanity; Italians, from what they’d seen, even more so; and castrati were reputed the worst.

They were greeted at the door by a maid better dressed than they were, which caused them a moment of panicked concern that subsided when they were cheerfully led into the house. It looked newly built, but was decorated with all manners of small porcelains and woodcuts that seemed selected for their age. Jan felt that the owner of the house must be someone practiced in the effect of carefully chosen appearances; Brigitte suspected there would be little to be found beneath them.

“Ah!” came the delighted cry from somewhere inside, preceding the swift-moving sight of the composer, who gave Brigitte the impression of an overfed Biblical giant wearing too much lace. “There you are—the lifeblood of every poet, the reason for every act of creation, the nourishment of the sensitive soul,” he enumerated as he crossed the hallway to embrace them with unexpected fervor. “Admirers.”

They proceeded to another room, which Jan abstained from commenting on, but which to his Dutch-shaped sensibilities was furnished in undeniable bad taste. No space was left blank, no rest was permitted to the eye, and his mind was taken back to the warning Brigitte had given him weeks before. She’d said Catholics knew no subtlety and thus she and Jan would need to remember to discipline their tongues if they wanted to obtain answers. That had been a long, heartfelt conversation, at the end of which she’d succeeded at convincing him to risk everything on this trip. He still dreaded the possibility of being left penniless and stranded far from home, but she’d been right. The script Fulla had written was the only clue they’d had in years about the fate of the Mayflower. Finding out what had become of their parents was well worth an assault on the senses. Since their entrance into Catholic lands, he hadn’t seen any of the sinful extravagance her words had hinted at, but the excess with which Samuele Fulla decorated his house and his own person matched every warning.

The previous night, when they had approached him on the street after a massively acclaimed performance, they had spoken in French, which had become the most practical way for travelers from all parts to make themselves understood in the world’s crossroads that was Venice, but once they had mentioned they were visiting from the Netherlands, the composer had switched to a very defective Dutch he was all too happy to boast of. During the hurried tour he was now giving them of his portrait collection, Brigitte’s ears caught what she believed to be an English turn of phrase transplanted onto rapid Dutch, but she couldn’t be certain, given the carefree way he was dismembering the language.

The maid reappeared and spoke into the composer’s ear. His face brightened and he announced, in an overexcited tone, “We have dinner!” Then he laughed, although it was not clear at what, and by exaggerated motions of his unnaturally long arms he guided his guests to the next room.

The food was not much to speak of; it consisted of carrot soup, watered-down wine, and one breaded chicken leg for each of them. Even the napkins looked insufficiently washed. The maiolica, however, was all but scandalous. Brigitte made a point of eating her soup in very small spoonfuls to ensure the conversation would not end prematurely.

“Signor Fulla,” she began, “as my husband so vehemently said to you last night, we were moved in our hearts by the noble sentiments expressed in your play. It has such an exquisiteness of feeling, such a refinement of passion—” she fell silent, at a sudden loss for synonyms. “Um… if you will excuse our curiosity, may we hear about that wondrous process some call inspiration?”

Fulla giggled at the open adulation, more delectable than the dinner to him. “Every composer cheats a little, I must say. We all take some bits from one another and pretend we’ve made something new. It used to be the case that people were so enamored with Monteverdi that everything sounded like him, but these days you won’t find a musician in Europe whose dream isn’t to be the next Froberger.” He went on like this for several minutes, making a conscious exhibition of every semitone of his voice, citing name after name that the Willemszoons had only seen in print, but never listened to. Then he caught his breath and added, “Oh, forgive me. I got carried away. Music is my obsession, you see. I could discuss this all night.”

“Have you always been a composer?” asked Jan. Brigitte had advised him not to pry too obviously. She gave him a reproving look she hoped Fulla didn’t notice.

“Not always, no.” He sipped the wine to give himself time to compose an answer in his head. “I’m a singer, too. That was, in fact, my sole occupation for many years.” Jan wanted to guess how old Fulla was, but those jaded, weary eyes in such an impossibly smooth face made him give up the attempt.

“We didn’t know that,” remarked Brigitte, immediately regretting her words. Samuele Fulla was a eunuch in Italy; she should have deduced he was a singer. She composed her face and continued, “We would have loved to hear you sing.”

“I wasn’t really famous back then,” he replied, and had another sip.

“Didn’t they ever give you a big role?” asked Jan.

That question amused Fulla. “Oh, I never sang opera,” he said with a nostalgic laugh. “With my lack of training, that would have been a preposterous ambition. I mean, I can sing, but you know how brutal competition has become. Producers won’t give you a role unless your voice is superhuman.” He stared at some imagined far point and gave a rehearsed sigh. “No, I found employment in small churches, at the last row of the choir, where my voice would be drowned among the rest and no one would see me.”

“And still, you didn’t let that hold you back,” pressed Brigitte.

“No, no, no, I clearly didn’t, as you see.” Fulla chuckled again, and it occurred to Jan that, to stave off annoyance, he might keep count of how many times the eunuch laughed at his own jokes. “All those years were mere preparation. Did you ever see my first production?”

He seemed to enjoy the surprise in their faces. Brigitte was speechless, and Jan covered for her, “We didn’t know there had been one. You’re saying you wrote another opera before Moorflower?”

His intention accomplished, Fulla’s face relaxed. “I did, yes, but I should not be too proud of it. It wasn’t as well received as I’d hoped. That might change now, though. After the success I’ve had with Moorflower, I’ve already heard some people say they’re eager for more of me. So, who knows? You might get a chance to see The Sultan’s Captive after all.”

Brigitte saw a thread dangling, and jumped for it. “My husband and I have a fascination for plays inspired by real history.” She saw she had Fulla’s attention, and pursued that line, her mind working at breakneck pace. “You know how often a lazy composer will resort to drawing from the Greeks, and I have to admit, that’s always popular, but after a while, all myths sound the same. Besides, it’s not a healthy topic for a good Christian to dwell upon for too long.” From Fulla came the sound of what she could have sworn was a chortle, but when she looked at him again, he was busy gulping down his soup. “So… after having seen with my own eyes how realistic your work can be, the question occurs to me whether actual events inspired that earlier composition.”

“Or the latest one?” added Jan, whom Brigitte sent another hard look.

“Hmm,” said Fulla, apparently intrigued by the question, and Brigitte prayed it was by hers. “Well, you can’t be an artist if you have too strong a sense of propriety. We routinely copy each other’s work, and sometimes even the greatest of artists will copy nature, too.” He threw a beaming smile at Brigitte, almost daring her to protest at the blasphemous implications of that reply. “In your northern lands, you must surely have heard of the captivity chronicles of Frú Steinunn Guðbrandsdóttir.”

Jan could see that Fulla was the kind of anxious artist who memorized such erudite allusions and spent their days waiting for a chance to mention them. “In the printing business,” he started, but Brigitte’s kick under the table told him he was getting too close to revealing who they were. “I mean, that’s one of the businesses where I’ve invested—one does come across such books all the time. They enjoy a popularity that baffles me. The edification of a decent character can scarcely profit from those accounts of savagery and cruelty.” He lamented not being as skilled with words as his wife. The point he had tried to make was that there were, indeed, numerous autobiographies by former slaves of the Ottoman Empire and its possessions circulating throughout Europe, and he wondered what Fulla’s purpose had been in picking the raid of Iceland as his example. It was rare enough to print a book written by a woman, but one where the enemies of Christendom were depicted in anything less than a scathing light was unspeakable. After a moment, he thought he’d finally caught Fulla’s meaning. “Was your first opera based on that book?”

That was the exact question Brigitte wanted to ask, but the wording struck her as too blunt. “Not just that one, I’m sure,” she offered, while casually sticking a fork in her piece of chicken. “Just by looking at the collections in this house, one can surmise Signor Fulla has access to many of those stories. So many authors have told the same tale so many times, it’s only too easy to—”

“The Sultan’s Captive is based on no book,” said Fulla, with a stern expression on his face that Jan didn’t understand but that Brigitte was expecting. She suppressed a smile of victory. She had bet on an indirect jab at his artistic pride, and it had paid off. “It tells my own life. I was a slave in the Mohammedan countries for eight years.”

That opened plenty more questions, and before Brigitte could formulate a proper one, Jan blurted, “Were the Turks the ones who castrated you?” Fulla nodded, not seeming to mind the personal question, and Brigitte’s mind started connecting dots. From the captivity novels, she knew the Turks routinely castrated their slaves, but only the little boys. If Fulla had spent his childhood years as a slave in foreign lands, he couldn’t have had the rigorous vocal training of professional castrati, which would explain why, once in Italy, his voice didn’t qualify for anything better than hiding at the back of a choir. In fact, he was lucky to be able to sing at all.

“Did they teach you to sing?” she asked.

The composer’s face twisted into a knowing smile. “Can your chaste ears bear the list of all the arts they taught me?”

She strived to control her breath as she deduced what he meant. “I’m not an unmarried girl. I know of the matters of the flesh. You may speak.”

He seemed pleased with that, and stood with a dramatic pose. “Here I may never be a noteworthy castrato, but as a child, in the halls of the imperial palace, I was the best köçek.” He took two spoons from a side table and started clanking them in his hands. “I learned to charm the eyes of a man like no harem ever can,” he added, gradually twirling his shoulders and tracing endless circles with his hips. “I sweetened the weary days of palace officials and ministers.” The rhythmic sound of the spoons became hypnotic, and he moved around the dining table with a gracefulness that should have been impossible for his massive frame.

“You’ve made your point, Signor Fulla,” said Brigitte, but he continued dancing, oblivious to their astonished stares.

“Can you imagine this being the fate of your child?” he said, twisting his hands in lewd gestures around his body, looking at them with an undecipherable mixture of pain and old anger. “Can you picture a boy, a proper Christian boy, raised in deliberate ignorance of the evils of the world, suddenly snatched by pirates, denied his manhood, and thrown into a life of boundless sensuality?” Jan averted his gaze, too disturbed to consider those words. “Can you imagine having so precious an art beaten into you every day, for interminable years, as your only way to survive?” He clanked the spoons one last time and ceased dancing. He looked at the Willemszoons with self-satisfaction. “I’m not a tender youth anymore, but I can still be enchanting when I want.” Seeing their quiet shock, he returned to his chair and started biting into his chicken. “You said you were moved by my work. I’d like to hear you elaborate on that opinion.”

The Willemszoons exchanged a confused look. Finally Jan said, “About Moorflower… we were especially interested in the story of the travelers. As you just described, awful things happen at sea.”

“You have no idea,” said Fulla to his meal.

“But the sort of adventures that you tell in that play…” he paused, unsure of whether that was the right time to be open. “I’m not saying they’re not an enrapturing narration, because I wouldn’t be here if that were not the case, but—”

“You want to know how much of it is real,” interrupted Fulla. The couple nodded nervously, and he rolled his eyes. “You think Moorflower is hard to believe? Pay more attention to the world. Look at what’s happening with the Spanish galleons: one out of every three gets lost and no one knows why. Look at the trade with India: it has plummeted because suddenly the Portuguese forgot how to sail through a storm. Look at the English and how they all had to run away from their little island to avoid being butchered by the Danish.” He stopped when he saw the Willemszoons’ faces darken at the mention of England. Their spirits were too drained by the evening’s heated conversation to keep concealing how much the topic mattered to them, even though, by Fulla’s reckoning, it had been ten years since the end of that kingdom. His attention was drawn to Jan’s hands, which were grabbing the tablecloth with fury. “I see that maritime tragedies have a personal significance to you. In any case, you should be the least offended, seeing as Dutch ships are doing just fine. Doesn’t this mystery gladden you, that every sailing nation is having unheard-of trouble keeping their ships from sinking—except the Dutch? One wonders what sorcery they have learned in the United Provinces, don’t you think?” He looked around the table, satisfied with their silence, and switched to fluent English. “Of course, you aren’t Hollanders. You were raised there, but your blood is English. It’s the only way Moorflower could have affected you so deeply.” His face appeared transformed to them. He was no longer the shining star of the theatre; he was just a tired man whose youth had ended too soon. “Look at yourselves. You aren’t good at this game. Last night I found it unbelievable that you’d come all the way to Venice just because you saw my name in the play, but I figured out what you wanted since the instant you mentioned you’d come from Leiden.”

Brigitte let out her breath, tired of caution. “We want the truth,” she said in a broken voice. “My father went on that ship. So did Jan’s. We never heard back from them. We thought they were lost forever.” She caught Fulla halfway through trying to compose a look of snide pity that he couldn’t sustain. “You know more than you wrote. You must have heard of our families, of the Brownists. We had placed so much hope on the Mayflower; when we finally accepted that they’d been lost, our hearts broke.” She contained a sob and kept talking. “I prayed for any news, any rumors, anything, until I was too tired to keep praying.” She tried to say more, but couldn’t.

Jan placed his hand on hers softly and took over. “We received word from England. Bishop Laud had published a sermon blaming our parents for their own disappearance. He said it was God’s punishment that had made the Brownist congregation lose their way in the ocean. We held dozens of discussions about that sermon; we didn’t know what to think, we didn’t know what God wanted from us, and we didn’t want to agree with Laud, but from then on none of us wanted to risk another trip.” While he spoke, he noticed battling emotions on Fulla’s face. “I don’t know you, but somehow this matters to you too.”

“A bunch of dead people? Why would it matter to me? Or to you?”

Incensed, Brigitte replied, “Our parents dreamed of a place where they could practice the true worship. But we…” She pushed against years of shame. “We stopped believing in that dream. We resigned ourselves to the worldly life of the Dutch. We stayed. We stayed, and all these years we’ve been trying to forget.”

“That’s what you should’ve done.”

“We can’t anymore. We read the play you wrote, and we wanted to hope again. In that play you speak of the congregation, of the settlement plan, of the persecution under King James; those parts anyone could have researched, but you also speak of the ship’s journey.” She could see that Fulla was making as much effort to hold back tears as she was. “I don’t want to think you made it up. You wouldn’t have been able to write about the ship if you didn’t know what happened to it. We need to know where you learned that story. We spent all our money coming here to ask you.”

A very old weight seemed to have fallen on Fulla. “All this for an opera play.”

“We saw a version in German,” said Jan.

“How can that exist?” Fulla’s eyes narrowed.

“I work with the Elzevirs at their printing shop; they found your play and started making copies.”

“They’re selling a translation? And I’m not getting paid?”

“Please,” urged Brigitte. “You have to tell us how our parents’ story reached you. Where did you hear it?”

Fulla looked at his plate for a long minute. Then, as if he knew he was making the wrong decision, but wasn’t capable of making any other, he said, “After the failure of my first play, my name as a composer is still worthless. The only reason Italians like this play is because it doesn’t end well for the Protestants. Did you read how it ends?”

“Even with our Dutch, our German isn’t that good,” admitted Jan. “We came here not knowing the end of the Elzevir version. Last night, at the theatre, we tried our best to follow the plot again, but sung Venetian is even harder.”

Fulla nodded. “I’m sorry that the truth has been so costly to you. I titled the play Moorflower because that’s what happened to the ship: it had been at sea for barely a week when it met with pirates from the Barbary coast.”

“What day was that?” asked Brigitte. Fulla gave her a questioning look, and she explained, “I need to know my father’s date of death.”

“Oh, they didn’t die on that day,” he said. “All occupants of the ship were taken as slaves, and some lived for many years. But if you must know, captain Sulayman took the Mayflower on the sixth day of its journey.” He closed his eyes, calculating. “I nearly forgot the English pay no mind to old Gregory. It must have been the eleventh day of September, by the old calendar, when the Mayflower was turned into a pirate ship.” The shock on his guests’ faces made him pause, but they had forced open a room in his memory that couldn’t be closed back. “That’s its ultimate fate. That’s the legacy it became known for. The 1620 raid of Iceland was made with the Mayflower.”

Making a visible effort to not burst in rage, Jan asked, “Do you know what became of either of our fathers?”

“Let me think. If you’re using the Dutch version of your name, you must be John, son of William. So you’re John Bradford, if I’m not wrong.”

John Bradford sighed in sad relief. “We stopped using our English names when we stopped waiting for our parents. My wife’s name used to be Bridget.”

With a sudden air of suspicion, she asked, “How did you know that must be his name?”

“Isn’t it obvious?” retorted Fulla. “How do you think I became the Sultan’s captive? How do you think I can speak Dutch? I was one of your congregation; I was with your parents on that ship, and I’m almost certainly your cousin, Bridget. My real name is Samuel Fuller. I’m the last survivor of the Mayflower.”

All fell silent. They stared at one another uncomfortably, sensing the pull of a new and undefined set of mutual obligations. John could hear his wife’s breath rise in pitch, like a badly tuned whistle, her fingers clenching her fork, until she burst out, “And now you dress like a degenerate, and even sing for those Popish heathens!”

“I see,” said Samuel, unfazed. “You didn’t seem to mind my life choices so much when you didn’t know we were related.”

Bridget stood up, and John whispered in an urgent tone, “We still need to hear what he knows.”

“Don’t you see what he’s done to our parents?”

“Done?” Samuel chuckled, between amusement and annoyance. “My dear lady, I’ve had things done to me, things whose mention would haunt your soul forever—”

“You soil everything our parents stood for. They gave their lives so you wouldn’t have to kiss any bishop’s behind.”

“Actually, they’re more often the ones who kiss mine.”

She slapped his face, before realizing her hand was still holding the fork. Samuel took a napkin and pressed it against his cheek.

“Bridget,” begged John. “This is unlike you.”

Surprised at herself, she dropped the bloodied utensil and fell back on her chair, caught in the incongruity of feeling too ashamed to deny what she’d done to Samuel’s face and too proud to offer an apology. She didn’t speak.

John said to Samuel, “We didn’t come to have an argument. We’re just desperate.”

Samuel removed the napkin from his cheek and inspected it. A red well had formed under his eye. The cut was shallow, and the bleeding was stopping, but the shock of the hit and the sight of the reddened cloth rekindled feelings he’d thought were buried.

John looked at his folded hands, weighing his next words. “You know better than anyone how much the trip meant to our parents.”

Brought back from an unwanted memory, Samuel was only able to mutter, “I do.” He pressed the napkin again to his cheek, holding it in place with two fingers.

The three of them were silent for a moment, then John tried again, “They must have been devastated to see their dream come to nothing.”

Samuel dismissed the idea with a wave of his hand. “I wish they had been devastated. That would’ve lightened their plight. But they were too hardheaded. Even after the pirates forced us to watch as they pillaged Iceland, even after we were taken to the slave market at Tripoli, even after each of us was sold and every foundation of our faith was crushed, even then our parents maintained the hope that one day God would save them, all the while our masters thanked the same God for granting them good lives and wealth. That’s what became of the Brownists. Sorry to disappoint you.”

Bridget shook her head. “Do you think you’re giving us bad news? I’ve been plagued with horrible thoughts for years, imagining the worst, praying for their salvation, and now you’re telling me they remained faithful and God-fearing until the end.” She placed her hand on her husband’s. “I couldn’t have wished for more.”

After a moment of disbelieving silence, Samuel said, “You’re just like them. A fool beyond teaching.”

“Watch how you speak to my wife,” spat John.

“Listen to what I’m telling you: their mission failed, and they refused to see it. They never saw that their journey was over, because they were too pious to know the proper things to fear!”

John stood up. “Bridget, let’s go. We know the truth now; we don’t have to hear any more insults to our family.”

She remained seated. “It’s his family too.” She looked up at John and explained, “We have lived the pain of not knowing; his was the pain of knowing.”

She offered to hold the napkin for Samuel, but he sharply jerked his head and turned his body away. “What more do you want from me?” he pled. His smooth, childlike face, poignant for a person who had been beaten into growing up, was smeared with blood and tears. “I’ve told you all I know. I’ve bared my life before you, and for no good reason. Why are you here? I’m nothing to you. I’m no longer a Brownist, not even a Christian, and you have no idea how much the Turks tried to make a good Mohammedan out of me. I’m tired of it all!”

His tortured yells stretched his face until the wound reopened. With the heel of his hand he tried to wipe off the blood and instead pushed it into his eye and he felt the floor wobble under him as if he were back on the Mayflower’s deck with Sulayman’s henchmen forcing his legs open for the knife as he cried out futile prayers. No one should have to be so familiar with the smell of his own blood; he tried to blink it away and saw a whirlwind of every year of his captivity: every master who had used the whip on him, every blow, every kick, every court official who had forced him into their pleasure. He grabbed the tablecloth and breathed several times.

“If God lives, He knows I have no stomach for religious disputes. Do you believe our parents followed the true faith? I’ve heard it all, every doctrine, every side in this ridiculous war, every lie that humans are capable of. I’ve learned to pray in the tongue of every nation that sails, and I’m tired. Did you hear Rome has sent missionaries to China? You have to admire the hubris of the whole affair. Preachers! I’m sick of preachers. I’m fed up with their self-satisfaction, their vanity, their claim to plant a flag in other nations’ minds. I won’t help you save our parents’ good name. They don’t deserve it, and I want no part in your quest. Am I clear? They were no heroes. There’s nothing to vindicate.” As he continued speaking, Bridget leaned in, possessed of newfound curiosity for this man. “They were prey to a Quixotic obsession, and I thank heaven that they didn’t live to drag other fools with them. So forget about them and do what they feared to: live a life. At least you have one. I’m no one. I’m stuck here in this swamp, where Turkish ships can show up at any time, where I have to sing praises I don’t believe in because no other country will employ me. Every month I have to sleep with the entire merchant fleet of Venice to complete rent, and don’t ask me what services I had to give the butcher to pay for this paltry supper. That’s my life. That’s what the last Brownist Puritan has come to. So tell me: why should I care what you need?”

Bridget was surprised that the answer came so easily to her. “Because until today you believed you had no one, but that’s not true. And if there are any members of our congregation who remain alive, they deserve to hear the same good news, and to come back as you did. I am sure, as much as you have left the faith, that you don’t wish for them to end their days in captivity, because you didn’t want that for yourself. That’s why you left, isn’t it? Moreover, you are proof that it is possible. The same love of freedom that moved you to find your way out can help us locate every last tripulant of the Mayflower and bring them home.”

Noon, January 5 (Julian), 1637

Amsterdam

There was just enough space inside the carriage for the three of them, yet they succeeded at exchanging no glances for the entire trip. Before arriving at their appointment in Amsterdam, their last, obligatory stop had been Leiden. Samuel had seized the opportunity for an extended walk around their parents’ town, of which he denied having any memories, while the Bradfords met with their coreligionaries without mentioning the specifics of the plan they had devised, the fact that it had been Samuel’s idea, or Samuel’s existence at all. What they intended to do in Amsterdam was too scandalous to admit to and too dangerous to reveal to the wrong ears.

In the carriage, Bridget was quietly praying for mercy. In her eyes every part of the scheme was distasteful, but she kept reminding herself that even Abraham had lied to the king of Egypt for a vital reason, and the man they were going to lie to was among the worldliest lovers of money in Europe. She recalled how her parents had cautioned her generation against learning the greed that was rife in Holland, port to the world, and hoped that the moneymaking trickery she was going to play a part in would not earn their censure. She not only avoided looking at her travel companions and accomplices; she deliberately placed her sight far from the transparent vase that John was holding. It had amazed her how skillfully Samuel had harnessed John’s contacts in the publishing world, her training as a bookbinder and his own storytelling talents to craft an elaborate web of letters of introduction, property deeds, bank statements, shipping manifests, insurance contracts, judicial rulings, and auction records, all of them believable and all of them false, that he had made circulate among selected businessmen in the Dutch Republic, and which built a climate of avid expectation for the item held between John’s hands. That was how they aspired to secure enough money to ransom their family: by exploiting the Dutchmen’s uncontrollable hunger for riches. And Samuel knew there was one product that made every investor in Amsterdam happily part with their money in the hopes of multiplying it later.

They were going to sell a tulip.

In actuality, they were not going to sell a tulip, but that was the whole point of the plan: Samuel’s documents, when put together, created the impression that a tulip existed and was up for sale. What the vase really contained was something Bridget struggled to push out of her mind.

Out of the corner of her eye it seemed to her that Samuel was making an exaggerated smile. He had started doing that to maintain the skin stretched so that the injury she had caused him would not leave a scar, but the habit had stuck and now he smiled continually, well aware of how it made her feel around him. His willingness to help them find a way to rescue their surviving relatives was hard to explain, she opined, coming from a man she had grievously hurt and who professed, by his own admission, no belief in forgiveness. But John saw his change of heart clearly. He had not agreed to join them out of loyalty to family or nation or church; their pleas had first appealed to such feelings, but they did not exist in him. What had won him over was something more fundamental, something truer.

It took them some minutes to realize that the carriage had stopped and they were expected to step out. They sunk their boots in the snow as uniformed servants gestured them up a shoveled path in the direction of a house that appeared less luxurious than they had supposed; this Samuel regarded with great interest, because its shape and decoration heralded something Italy had made grasping motions at, but Holland had embraced in full, a change of times that was as unassuming as it was consequential: here was growing a new type of aristocracy, one proclaimed not by genealogists, but by accountants.

They carried the vase into a well-lit room, planted with dozens of kinds of flowers. The place made Samuel nervous. Even under the languid sun of winter, he wanted as little light as possible to fall on the vase. John placed it on an empty table at the center, and Samuel wondered whether he could position himself to block enough of the light without looking too obvious in his intent. He was starting to walk between the table and the windows when Bridget asked in a hushed tone, “Is it believable?”

“You tell me,” he replied. “I haven’t seen a bulb in years.”

“Wasn’t the Sultan surrounded by them?” asked John.

“I was used as an entertainer, not as a gardener.” He noticed the quick lowering of John’s eyes, and added, “You’ve been imagining it.”

“What?”

“My life as a slave. You’ve been wondering what it was like.”

John’s face froze in a way that revealed, without the need for more light, that he was blushing. He looked away, catching an unwanted glimpse of himself in the dew that had formed on a branch of anemones. “Your life—”

“Is infinitely more complicated than everything you knew. You don’t have to tell me. It happens with everyone.” Samuel intended to resume walking, but stopped abruptly. John’s face had sunk beyond embarrassment.

“You have… shifted my perspective.”

“Oh? And what did you believe until now?”

John looked at Bridget, seeking reassurance, but she didn’t know what was on his mind. He glanced at the interior of the house. There was no indication that their host was about to greet them. With a tone that came out weaker than intended, he said, “I grew up wishing I had gone with them on that ship.”

“But now that you’ve met me,” said Samuel, “you’re relieved. You look at me and feel glad that this wasn’t you.” He looked around the room, realizing it had been built as a greenhouse, and stretched his face one more time, to avoid laughing. “You’ve mourned them for years, but now you can’t decide whom to feel sorrier for.”

Bridget raised her hands. “You two, stop. We’ve been traveling for weeks; you could’ve had this discussion anytime. We can’t afford distractions.” She turned to John. “Whom are we scheduled to see?”

His face strained as he recalled the name. “Gabriël Marselis.” They had chosen him because he traded with the king of Denmark, who had paid an enormous sum to ransom the Icelanders Sulayman had kidnapped with the Mayflower. Doing business with Marselis would be a roundabout way of obtaining money from the Danish crown.

She turned to Samuel. “And what’s our story?”

He immediately shifted into a dramatic pose. “Finding myself in mortal peril, I saw a chance to pause and pick a bulb from the Sultan’s gardens as I bravely ran from his palace. Bridget, you don’t need to worry about my part in this play; I wrote it.”

She waved at the decorations in the house. “Do you think one becomes this rich by being gullible?”

Samuel opened his mouth but was interrupted by a servant who entered the room and announced that the master of the house was ready to welcome them. They barely had any time to thank him when Gabriël Marselis made his appearance. John and Bridget were used to the plain look of a Calvinist businessman, but it took Samuel another moment to accept that this was the man they had exchanged letters with. Unlike Italians, who relied on their clothes to make their importance visible, Marselis commanded the room effortlessly.

He noticed the vase with the bulb and stared at it for a while. Samuel tried to come up with excuses for not letting more light in, but Marselis didn’t seem to notice or care.

“That is beautiful glass.”

“Venetian crystal,” boasted Samuel. “The best there is.”

Marselis raised a finger at them. “Which of you is the seller?”

“I am, sir. Jan Willemszoon.” He extended his hand, which Marselis shook without taking his eyes off the vase. “The man who communicated with you is my partner, Samuele Fulla.”

Samuel took a step forward and nodded. “At your service.”

“I really appreciate your taking time from your singing tour for this meeting.”

“Oh, it’s nothing. I’ve been taking care of this flower long enough. My good friends the Willemszoons assured me that the Dutch Republic was a favorable place to find buyers.”

They had lost days discussing how strongly they should allude to unnamed others who might be interested in the bulb. It was, in any case, a bait that Marselis refused to bite. “Your letters claim that your tulip comes from the Sultan himself.”

“That’s right. As I described in writing, I was taken by pirates and sold as a slave in Istanbul. I was able to break free, not four years ago, with the help of a Ragusan captain. It was a rather rushed escapade, but even in those lands one hears of how fondly Christians appreciate this plant. It has since bloomed every spring, without fault.”

“It’s a shame you only took one.”

“I, too, regret my lack of foresight, but when I was leaving the palace, my main concern was to remain unseen.”

“Wholly understandable,” said the businessman, his eyes stabbing right into Samuel’s. “It’s a terrible thing to be caught stealing from a powerful man.”

Bridget stood very still to not betray her panic, but Marselis leaped to her.

“You. Are you with these gentlemen?”

“Brigitte Willemszoon,” she curtsied.

Marselis ignored her and spoke to John. “It’s most unusual to bring one’s wife to a negotiation.”

“Our asking price is six thousand guilders,” she pointed out. “A promissory note will do.”

He looked at her again. “Is this your first sale?”

“Such a price ought to cause no wonder these days,” she said with the assurance of a role well learned. “Your secretary has received all legal records about this flower, and can verify the honorableness of our offer, as well as its increase in value over the past couple of years.”

Marselis chuckled and pointed at the vase in disbelief. “You don’t know how vulnerable it is. For how long have you kept it unplanted?” He gave John a look of pity. “Someone should have warned you it’s dangerous to move the bulb around in winter.”

Samuel rushed to cover John’s stunned silence. “I managed to break it.”

Everyone was paralyzed: Marselis with delight; John with shock; Bridget with dread. That assertion was to be kept as their last card if the buyer questioned their veracity. Tulips with broken colors were the most sought after; no amount was deemed too absurd for one. How to produce multicolored petals was the most prized mystery in Europe. Marselis walked slowly toward Samuel, not fully convinced. “The auction papers describe this flower as purplish black.”

“So it was until last year,” said Samuel, his mind exerting to put flesh on the bones of his lie. “By changing the soil and reducing the sunlight, I was able to make the tips of the petals pale yellow.”

“That’s… that’s a completely new variety.” Marselis breathed deeply. “It will be worth entire estates.” He cast another glance at the vase, his expression unreadable. “Do you realize what you’ve brought with you?” He gave a signal to his servant, who left the room. “There are certain traditions we like to keep in the tulip trade, and anyone can tell that you don’t know them.” He walked closer to the table, inspecting the bulb with unmoving eyes. “In bidding season, transactions of this type can proceed so fast that what changes hands is the letter of property, not the tulip itself. Did no one tell you?” The three conspirators resisted the urge to look at each other and soothe their growing sense of unease. The servant returned, carrying a tiny box in his hands. Marselis opened it and looked inside. “But against all good sense, you decided to bring me the single most expensive thing that exists.” From the box he took a pistol which, with the movements of a man accustomed to it, he aimed at Samuel’s chest. “You want six thousand guilders? I’ll make you a better offer. You’re going to tell me how to grow a broken tulip. Then I can decide how many of you live.”

Samuel snatched the vase and held it as a shield, hoping his opponent wouldn’t risk shooting at the bulb as long as he believed it to be authentic. Marselis, without a thought, shot at John.

From the center of his shirt a dark red blotch spread fast and his body fell. Bridget cried out in terror as Marselis calmly reloaded the pistol and aimed it at her. “Signor Fulla, you’re still valuable until you tell me your secret, but you’re running out of friends. You came to trade. So let’s trade: she keeps her life, and I keep the flower.”

Seeing no other option, Samuel hurled the vase at Marselis, breaking it against his head. He grabbed Bridget by the arm and made for the door. She resisted being parted from John, and Samuel yelled, “No time. Run!”

He pulled her out of the hall and headed for the main door, but it was guarded by more servants. She turned and saw another way. “Upstairs! Come!” she yelled.

They hurried to the next floor, ignoring the angry screams from below. Sensing their chaser’s approach, they picked a room and hid inside. Samuel dragged a massive desk to block the door and collapsed, overcome with the burst of effort.

Bridget sat on the rug by his side, finally letting herself cry, both for her life and for John’s. She was shaking, muttering incomprehensible words that Samuel wished Marselis wouldn’t hear.

“You can’t stay hidden,” said Marselis from outside. “You’re in my house, and you have no way out.”

That wasn’t quite true; Samuel noticed that the room, which was furnished like an office, had a large window looking over the main entrance of the house. But he also saw, when he drew the curtain open, a group of servants gathering outside despite the cold, no doubt expecting their attempt to flee.

He regretted having destroyed the vase. Marselis must have already ordered someone to pick up the bulb and replant it. As soon as it were discovered to be nothing but layers of tinted leather, it would no longer matter whether they succeeded at leaving the house: there would be no hiding place for them.

The desk moved a notch, pushing Bridget out of her commotion. She looked up and noticed that the door to the office was being forced. “The desk won’t be enough,” she warned. Samuel looked around for another piece of furniture to add to the door, but there were only a few chairs, a lit fireplace with no useful implements, and a bookcase that proved immovable; his efforts only managed to drop a dozen books to the floor. Bridget felt strange seeing such a big man be so lacking in muscle, and climbed onto the desk to add her own weight to it. He saw the sense in her decision and joined her on the desk.

She looked behind her and toward the door. The shoves had ceased, but not knowing what Marselis could be planning felt worse. “Today we die.”

“What happened to that faith of yours?” spat Samuel, and he bit his tongue one moment too late. She had just become a widow, and he felt a pang of guilt for his harshness.

For the first time since he had met her, she laughed, the sound mixing with her sobs. “You wonder about my faith?” She rubbed her face with her hands, trying to get rid of tears that kept coming. “To think that all those years in Leiden, I believed my faith was being tested. I believed my life was bad. Look at us now.”

“What was bad about your life?”

Bridget had a long look at her cousin, focusing her attention on the scar on his face to avoid picturing the years of horror she knew he’d been through. To complain of a hard life in front of this man had a taste of the incongruous. She shook away the feeling and pushed her mind back to his question. “Perhaps you remember what the congregation used to teach about life in Holland. That it was too evil for us.”

“The way I remember it,” he replied, “we were too good for it. I didn’t see how wrong we’d been until I saw Istanbul.” His gaze tried to reach past the window, beyond the horizon and around the curve of the globe. “They were other people, and they were like us. They lived their lives the best way they knew how to. Like everyone.”

“You don’t think our parents found some truth that no one else saw?”

“And what could it have been?” He tried to keep a level tone, but the unseen threat from behind the door kept his nerves on alert. “There is no better place to live, in all of Christendom, than Holland. If our parents were so unhappy here, why didn’t they just move to Geneva? No, they had to build their own Geneva, just a more insufferable one. Tell me: did you really want to be with them in whatever new nation they wanted to make? I shudder to even picture what that place must have been like. Can’t you fathom the horror of taking the worst of Europe’s wars and making it the norm for everyday life? Is that what you yearned for?” He shut up when he remembered that John had described the same desire just minutes before dying. “I should probably be speaking of other things right now.”

“I’ve never been one to be afraid of truth.”

Samuel had to admit he’d found something to admire in her. “That’s a trait you didn’t get from our family.”

“I am my own person.” She rearranged the papers on the desk to sit more comfortably and saw there were diagrams on several of them. “Do you understand what these are about?”

He held a paper aloft and frowned. “I don’t know anything about shipbuilding, but this design makes no sense.” The craft depicted was all hull and no masts; it had no discernible way to sail. He looked at the back of the sheet and saw lists of numbers and names he didn’t know. He read aloud, “Hafgufuprojektet.” He raised an eyebrow at Bridget. “This is not Dutch.”

“Marselis trades with King Christian; maybe it’s Danish.”

Samuel left the paper with the others, resigned to not having answers. “We could be sitting on the secret of how they get to China and we’d never know it.”

A gunshot passed through the door and between their heads, shattering one of the windowpanes. They jumped down from the desk and crouched in front of it, putting their combined weight against the door. Bridget closed her eyes, where tears were forming again.

“I can’t wait all day,” said the voice of Marselis. “I’ll break this door open.”

They heard his steps grow fainter, and Bridget risked raising her head above the desk. “He must have gone to fetch an axe. What do we do?”

Samuel’s eyes roamed for an answer, but apart from the fireplace, the bookcase and the chairs, the only item at hand was the desk behind his back. He considered leaving his post to do a proper search, but it would only let Marselis burst his way in. His tired gaze rested on the floor, where thin rectangles of afternoon light were starting to form by the window. Again it drew his attention; it spanned the entire height from floor to ceiling. He felt the impulse to take that exit but knew he’d only jump into the hands of his pursuers. It was pointless to even plan on waiting for them to leave the spot under the window; Marselis must have guessed he’d want to try that way out, and ordered his men to stand ready to catch him or Bridget.

A plan began to form in his mind, a way to take advantage of their position.

“They’re expecting us to jump,” he whispered, nodding toward the window.

She shook her head. “They’ll kill us.”

He smiled, knocking on the hard wood of the desk. “Blessed be Dutch architecture and its large windows.”

She stared at the desk, not understanding at first, but when she saw what he meant, she stood up. “Both of us will have to do it.”

He positioned himself across from her and ran his hands over the solid wood, anticipating the difficulty of the task and feeling his pulse hammer with the passing of precious instants at any of which his life could end. He took several deep breaths. “As soon as we take this away from the door, we’ll be easy targets. We have to do this before he returns.”

They nodded at each other and grabbed the sides of the desk. After one last gulp of air, they pushed the heavy mass across the office, smashing past the window and dropping it on the unsuspecting servants outside. There was a chorus of startled screams, quickly silenced by the thud of wood hitting bone. Samuel stayed motionless, surprised at what he’d done; then, upon hearing no more voices, ventured a quick look down. The threat was stunned and immobilized.

“What now?” asked Bridget.

“Now we jump.” He took her hand and led her back, toward the door.

“There’s a desk just below us! What’s to catch our fall?”

“Snow,” he replied, and they took a running start, to land beyond the broken mass of wood and limbs. The snow was deep but wet, and it brushed against their faces with a sudden burn they took a moment to shake off. Bridget stood up at once, ignoring the protest from her guts at the violent jerk they’d just suffered. Not wishing to look behind, for fear that Marselis could come out the front door at any time, she helped Samuel stagger to his feet and took him running away from the mansion, down the shoveled path and into the dimly sunlit streets of Amsterdam.

Night, March 19 (Julian), 1637

New Amsterdam

Making a living in New Amsterdam meant dealing in fur. Natives from the lakes brought it down the North River and traded it with the Dutch, who exported most of it, but using her experience with leather, Bridget had been able to find the occasional client who needed a hat made or a glove repaired. As for Samuel, his occupation was to wear a false beard, puff up his enormous chest and pretend to be her husband. She was uncomfortable having a castrated man perform the part that should have been John’s, but Samuel had made it clear to her, without disclosing the most painful details, how lustful sailors could be and how dangerous it was to live in a city full of them. If he couldn’t find employment with the only talents he knew, he could at least keep her safe while she supported them both.

Nevertheless, the situation they had found themselves forced into had not sufficed to bring them closer. For the practical ends of ordinary life, they were a family, but all that Bridget’s mind had space for was her grief, and Samuel resisted the idea that blood ties meant anything. They concurred, tacitly, on their mutual need for help, but they refused to give anything beyond that. He hadn’t spoken a word of condolence to her, and she hadn’t let him know how she felt about setting foot in America without her parents. Each of them suspected that the other had hours’ worth of unsaid feelings to pour out, and that intuition was what prevented them from being open. They had reached that degree of deep acquaintance that made the prospect of communication unbearable.

There was another, more urgent reason why their newfound arrangement couldn’t last: no shore in the world, save for the icy pole, was beyond the reach of a Dutch vessel. That simple fact had at first felt like an oddity, a coincidence that only by insistent retelling at harbors and trading posts had begun to be taken seriously as the menace it was. No one had figured out why, for the past decade, all other flags had become the target of—what? Random weather? A monster that ate ships? An unrecognized new naval power? God’s wrath? The answer remained elusive, and shipwreck by unexplainable shipwreck, the maritime reign of Spain and Portugal was ending. Those whose business relied on the trade of goods and of people couldn’t point to a distinct moment when the ocean landscape had shifted, but the sense of unease was spreading. Captains of Sweden, France and Venice were growing anxious. No one dared admit it out loud, but the routes between continents were falling into Dutch control. For Samuel and Bridget, that had meant that obtaining passage with the West Indies Company was their best chance of fleeing Marselis without the risk of disappearing mid-route; however, it also meant that they would remain safe in their destination for no longer than it took the next ship from Holland to bring the news that two people matching their description were wanted for fraud and possibly murder. They had avoided the East Indies Company only because Bridget had refused to resettle among heathens, but New Amsterdam couldn’t be more than a temporary refuge. The surest way to stay out of sight of a seafaring empire was to move inland.

Samuel was quickly becoming known in the taverns of Manhattan as a patron who seldom drank and loved instead to ask questions. The former trait had as much to do with Bridget’s careful management of their money as with his need to stay in character as a manly brute, and the latter with their search for someone who could help them hide upstream.

The unexpected sound of French caught Samuel’s attention in one of the taverns he was scouting that night. Before his ears could locate the voice, he thought it belonged to a woman, but the figure clad in a white bearskin who was asking the bartender for a glass of ale moved in a way that confounded his senses. He waited until the newcomer turned around and revealed Native clothes. That was a possibility he hadn’t considered, and he chastised himself for it. Who better to help them evade the quarrels of Europe than a non-European?

As he approached the stranger’s table, he felt a disquieting sense of familiarity. This person had a distinctive set of facial features and body proportions he had only seen in other eunuchs, but there was something more to it, something he couldn’t ascertain, and by the time he was standing next to the table, his only certainty was his state of complete fascination.

“Good evening, sir. May I accompany you?” he asked in nervous French.

The Native looked at Samuel with amused curiosity. “Company is always welcome.”

Again that voice, that unique pitch that resisted categorization. Samuel took a seat and extended his hand. “Samuel Fuller.”

Immediately he realized he didn’t know whether this person would share European customs, but the Native shook his hand effortlessly. “Odahingum.”

He hadn’t experienced such a surge of curious interest in a long time. Castration had not taken away his capacity for lust, and both his fellow captives in the Sultan’s court and the perennially youthful singers of Venice had shared with him the bittersweet raptures of a desire that existed intact in the mind yet couldn’t take solid form. He’d been taught he might lose those feelings in his mature age, and he’d become convinced he had. Still, something in him was drawn toward this stranger’s epicene beauty. He believed he saw the outline of a breast under the bear’s fur, but given the low candlelight, he couldn’t make sure without looking rude. Another eunuch, perhaps? During his years of servitude, he’d made acquaintance with hundreds like himself, and been lovers with dozens, but no true friendship had been possible between souls trapped in their respective private hells. Like the existence of America, unimagined until found, the notion that someone like him could appear so untroubled, so carefree, was a possibility he’d never considered until he saw the calm smile in front of him. He hadn’t heard of any tribe that practiced castration, and he discarded that conjecture when he noticed the faintest shade of a beard.

“Are you done appraising me?”

Samuel blushed. “I’m sorry. I’m being too blunt.” He smiled, hoping the scar on his face wouldn’t show.

“You’re not the first European who feels compelled to take a good look at me.”

That sentence revealed more than it said, Samuel thought. It wasn’t not the first person but not the first European. That had to mean that the Natives didn’t find anything surprising about someone who displayed such ambiguity.

Samuel offered an apologetic smile. “You probably know what I’m burning to ask you.” Then, after a moment of thought, “And you’re probably tired of hearing it.”

Odahingum took a sip of ale. “A question is not bad in itself. It’s the intent behind it that matters.”

“My intent, actually, is to hire your services.”

“What do you need?”

“My…” He interrupted himself and lowered his voice. “My… cousin and I want to leave this city. The farther from the coast, the better.”

“Ah. You’re looking for a guide.”

“That. A guide, yes.”

“And what about me gave you the idea that I had any skill in that occupation?” Odahingum’s French was elegant, almost too elaborate for Samuel to follow.

“Well, you’re… um…”

“Not from here. You seem to think that’s enough.”

Samuel raised helpless hands. “Not here is exactly where we need to be. If you know someplace else to go, we’ll go there.”

Odahingum regarded Samuel with preoccupation. “As it happens, I’ve just returned from serving as someone’s guide.”

“Where to?”

“Munkhaven.”

Samuel’s eyes opened wide. The fabled port on Hudson Bay where Munk the Dane had spent that horrible winter before finding the Arctic route was an impossible distance north of New Amsterdam. “You’ve been there?”

“Last year a French priest wanted to try his luck preaching at the Danish colonists.”

Samuel chuckled. Even here, at the other end of an ocean that ought to render all disagreements forgotten, the followers of Jesus kept finding ways to chase after one another. “Did he convert anyone?”

“He never got the chance. We almost made it to the town, but we crossed paths with a huge white bear and the priest started praying for it to leave us.”

“Did the bear leave?”

“Of course not. It ate him.” Odahingum seemed to savor the shock in Samuel’s face. “Poor Father Martin. In return, the bear gave me its skin.”

He looked at the imposing head of the beast adorning the Native’s crown. “So you’re not only a guide, but a hunter, too.”

“Is being more than one thing a difficult concept for you?”

“I’m sorry. I forgot my manners again.” He knew it was wrong to stare, but he felt increasingly captivated by the face in front of him. “You look young, for someone who kills bears.”

Odahingum leaned in and replied, in a low voice, “And you look a bit too old to need that beard.” Samuel stayed very still on his chair, realizing he hadn’t prepared a way out in case he was discovered.

“This beard… was supposed to ward off questions.”

“That’s exactly the type of answer that creates more questions.”

“If I sate your curiosity, will you do the same for mine?”

“It’s only fair.”

“Very well. Will you tell me?”

Odahingum laughed. “It always goes back to that question, doesn’t it?”

“You have the advantage,” said Samuel. “At its heart, a question is a confession of ignorance.”

“You’re right. Where I live, no one needs to ask.”

“So…?”

“So, you’re starting to sound like the French.”

Samuel was confused by that. “We are speaking French.”

“I mean like the priests. Have you seen them?”

“Let’s say the Church and I don’t make good company.”

“They’re funny. Dotting the land with their cute churches, trying to fit this whole continent into neat categories.”

“It sounds like you’ve had this same discussion with them.”

“So many times. I was made to attend one of their schools.”

Samuel raised his glass. “To time lost.”

They both drank. “Oh, you have no idea. I lost all contact with my clan for years. My father didn’t want my own people to teach me.”

“Your father?”

“He was French. He was what they call a runner of the woods.”

Samuel had heard that term; it was a dangerous occupation some Frenchmen took in the lakes to secure better furs by adopting the Natives’ customs. “I hope you can see why that creates more questions.”

Odahingum laughed again. “Haven’t you ever wondered how New Amsterdam gets furs in the first place?”

Samuel had another look at the bearskin. “I don’t suppose you have much use in the lakes for golden florins.”

“True, we don’t use your coins, but we do live by reciprocity. Frenchmen come to the lakes and take our women as wives. It’s a good exchange for both families.”

Samuel was incredulous. “Your parents got married as a transaction?”

“Not unlike every king of France.”

They shared a sincere laugh and the private wish for it to happen again.

“Naturally, there was lust involved as well,” added Odahingum. “Just like everywhere else.”

“The priests must not be happy with your way of doing business.”

“Oh, they’re never happy with anything.”

Samuel drank again. “Was Jesuit school a total waste, though?”

Odahingum took a moment to consider the question. “Learning has to be mutual. I was happy to listen to French conjugations all day, but I had no patience for people who wouldn’t listen back. They say they come to teach us the way, the truth and the life, but I fail to find anything joyful in what they bring. Do you really follow that faith in Europe?”

“Half of us do. At the very least, we claim to.”

“How do you keep a civilization in a permanent state of terror for the future?”

Samuel opened his hands. “Now do you see why I want to leave this place?”

Another shared laugh. “No, you haven’t told me why yet. The true reason, I mean.”

Samuel sensed this stranger was taking a serious liking for him. “You ask your question, and I’ll ask mine.”

“I know your question.”

“Of course.” He was enjoying the tension.

“Do you care either way?”

Samuel sighed. “I can assure you that the truth about you will be nowhere near as troubling as the truth about me.”

Odahingum thought about it for a long while, then said, “I’ve had to deal with Europeans all my life. You always want to know, but you’re never fully aware of what it is that you want to know. One moment, you look at us the way one looks at the soaring flight of an eagle, and the next, you give us the look one gives a tortoise choking on an insect. And after enough iterations, it starts to get exhausting to be expected to constantly explain ourselves to you. Your problem is not that you haven’t decided what we are, but that you believe you get to decide.”

An idea connected to another in Samuel’s head, and he said, “It’s funny that a moment ago you mentioned the kings of France. In every generation, the fate of Europe hinged on what came from the loins of a queen: a boy or a girl?”

“I know about that. French father, remember?”

“Forgive me. I shouldn’t have assumed—”

“I hear they still have a law that forbids a princess from sitting on the throne.”

Samuel nodded. “They wouldn’t have known what to make of a child like you.”

“Why? I’m nothing unique. At some point, a queen of France may very well have had a child like me.”

“But what do you think would have happened to that child?”

“A life with very little freedom.”

Samuel gave this some thought, and asked the bartender for more ale. “I don’t think I remember having ever been able to converse in this manner.”

“In what manner?”

He mulled that question until he knew the right words. “Without fear of being hated.”

Odahingum found that answer touching. “Who has hated you?”

Before he could stop himself, Samuel said, “I have, sometimes.” And the plain honesty of those words felt new to him, and he smiled at the relief of knowing, somehow, that Odahingum would not resent his honesty.

“You have shown me the truth about you.”

“I don’t understand how, but I’m not afraid of it.”

“In exchange, I’ll give you the truth about me.”

Another conclusion was forming in Samuel’s mind. “Is that what always happened? People have demanded your truth, but withheld their own?”

Odahingum nodded. “The priests don’t have any truths to offer us. They see someone like me and lose all grasp of reality. They have too few words to put the truth into. All they know to say is: il ou elle?”

“What’s the right answer?”

“It doesn’t exist in your language. The word is wiin.”

Morning, May 13 (Gregorian), 1637

Lake Ontario

Odahingum had first offered to sell the bearskin to the Jesuit missionaries, but they were wary of touching the animal that had killed one of their brethren. Met with the same response at all the French outposts around the lakes, wiin had decided wiin would have to leave Catholic lands if wiin wanted to get rid of that skin. But with summer approaching, more white bears would be moving southward, seeking solid ground, which made it riskier to visit Munkhaven. There was the option of offering the fur to the Maskekowak who lived just beyond the lakes; they might easily sell it in turn to the Danish. But the Maskekowak had more experience dealing with white bears than an Ojibwe like wiin, which meant they were able to procure their own fur when they needed it. So wiin had headed down the North River to the Dutch colonies, where wiin’s path crossed with the couple who called themselves the Fullers.

As much as Bridget had appreciated wiin’s disposition to join them, she had felt some apprehension about leaving what was beginning to take the shape of a peaceful life of work. In the end, she agreed that they were too exposed as long as they remained in Dutch territory. Since it would have been hard to sell the fur of a white bear in the summer, she had suggested to cut it into pieces to make minor accessories of the kind that sold all year round. When she was done selling all the parts, she thanked Odahingum for not having discarded the head or the paws, as she had negotiated a handsome sum from a carver who planned to make a luxury chess set with the white pieces made from the teeth and the black ones from the claws. As intermediary, she took a small commission of the proceeds, because she anticipated they’d need European money to exchange with the French, and with the rest she bought things for Odahingum: needles, cooking pots, arrowheads, fishhooks, a hunting knife, and a compass. The last one delighted wiin, and during the first days of their journey wiin stared continually at the small case, marveling at how the other iron items could fool it.

They had traveled by canoe for the first half of the trip, then westward by foot until they reached the lake. The splendor of the mountains in the late spring was soothing to Samuel’s spirits, which until then had grown too accustomed to the weight of a life that had been interrupted many times. He felt, at last, allowed to taste a moment of solace. Odahingum, perhaps by force of habituation, had shown less amazement at the landscape they were traversing, but when Samuel proclaimed, one bright morning, his desire to spend his old age in the midst of all that beauty, wiin judged it a wise choice.

Bridget didn’t share his excitement. Most days her mood had been inscrutable, but when she forgot to keep a blank face, it didn’t invite questions. Intrigued by her silence, Odahingum tried once to get to her, but she snapped at wiin and went back to keeping to herself.

The first thing of note they saw on the morning of their arrival at the lake settlement was a queue of robed figures burning incense and humming lamentations from house to house. Odahingum’s expression darkened. “This keeps happening. Why did they have to come?”

Bridget sensed she should be alarmed, but didn’t fully understand why. “What keeps happening?”

“It has more than one name,” wiin said. “Some years they call it measles. Others it’s pox; others it’s typhoid. It’s one of the things that amaze me about Europeans, that you have so many words for death.”

The missionaries’ large wooden house, built in a plain, economical style, stood next to a corral with hens and pigs and a vegetable garden. On top of the roof a group of novices were making repairs to the bell cot. Beyond it, scattered over the land, a dozen houses. Samuel pointed at them and said, “All the doors are closed. Only the priests are outdoors. It looks like the town is quarantined.”

“Should we leave?” asked Bridget. “I already had measles, but I don’t know about you two—”

“You can survive it?” asked a shocked Odahingum, giving her a long, detailed look. “How?”

She wanted to tell wiin that her mother’s prayers had healed her, but the truth, which she had kept all her life as a secret shame, was that her congregation had collected contributions from all its members to pay for a Jewish medic to come from Amsterdam and treat her.

Seeing her disturbed face, wiin gave up the inquiry. “I’m sorry I brought you here. It wasn’t like this in the winter.”

They stood by the last of the trees before reaching the settlement, almost hiding from it. With all the incense smoke, it was doubtful that the priests had noticed them.

Odahingum started walking back into the forest. “They claim to be saving us, and all they’re good for is bringing their plagues!”

Samuel enjoyed watching Bridget start a reply, then check herself. He expected her to be in favor of preaching, just not by Catholics. He let her ruminate on that and said to Odahingum, “You couldn’t have known. And it’s not your fault. What we need to discuss now is where to go.”

“We could wait out the quarantine and come back,” suggested Bridget.

“I’ve grown fond of the forest,” said Samuel, “but I was really hoping to sleep in a bed tonight.”

Wiin shook wiin’s head. “It won’t be here.”

Bridget had another look at the town, noticed the different house designs, and remarked, “There are so many locals in the mission. Didn’t you say that the priests were having little success with conversions?”

“This is what little success looks like,” wiin answered. “Farther north, in Acadia, they’re much more aggressive, and have baptized whole tribes. I heard their superior complain that the Pope wants the whole regions converted before it occurs to the Danes to expand southward. He mentioned some fiasco that happened to their priests in China, but before you ask me what it was, I didn’t care enough to ask them myself.”

Bridget felt a pang of disappointment at that news. Not only was she the only Brownist in the new world, but her congregation’s old enemies had arrived here too. Shame surged inside her as she noticed herself starting to doubt that the passengers of the Mayflower would have been able to maintain their faith pure here, or anywhere. The Age of the Ship had made the dream of isolation impossible.

Samuel waved in an arc around them. “Have the fur traders built other settlements in this area?”

“I know one to the north, near Lake St. Louis.” Wiin had acquired the habit of pointing at directions with the compass in wiin’s hand. “But that route would take you closer to open sea, which you said you’d rather avoid.”

“And their town surely won’t be as organized as this one,” added Bridget, and Samuel could have sworn she regretted saying that one favorable thing about the missionaries.

“At least the traders have something of use to offer,” said Odahingum. Wiin kept walking, and the others followed.

“Ah,” said Samuel. Odahingum raised an eyebrow, and he explained, “Up to now, I was trying to ascertain whether you hated us.”

“Why would I?”

“Because we’re Europeans too.”

Odahingum made a sound that could be taken as either a chuckle or a grunt. “What a simple person you must think I am.”

“No, no, no, I think I figured it out,” Samuel hastened to add. “You’re fine with us as long as we don’t start preaching. Am I right?”

“That’s not fair,” protested Bridget.

“What, you’re still thinking of our parents?”

Somehow the air abandoned the warmth of spring. They all could hear the change in her breathing, and Samuel silently cursed himself for having broken weeks of successfully avoiding the one topic that united them. Bridget turned toward him, and he could already read what she would say. This was the moment; this was the conversation they had been trying not to have. “You mean to tell me you haven’t given them any thought?”

Samuel tried to think of the most effective way to end the argument, and could only come up with the worst line of attack. “What we’re doing here is not about them.”

She grabbed him by the coat. “Then what are we doing here? Why did we risk boarding a ship to America? Of all the ways we could have escaped, why did you agree to the one plan that involved completing our parents’ journey?”

He took a nervous breath. “I’m telling you it’s not about them. Our lives don’t begin and end with the Mayflower. The world will keep going.”

“I can’t.”

She saw he had no response to that; she wasn’t expecting one. She had shut off her sentiments so deeply that now she could only intuit the vaguest image of what she wanted. Indeed, since John’s death she had forgotten her ability to want. The Mayflower had so prominently inhabited her fancy that she’d never envisioned what life would come after reaching shore. She had crossed the unseen border of her childhood dreams. As if asking for the next piece of guidance, she gave Odahingum a pleading look, but wiin, who had not heard of the Mayflower, nor would wiin ever need to, could only give her a tentative smile of commiseration. For the first time she faced the prospect of not having her destiny written for her.

All this was finally becoming evident for Samuel, and against his lifelong revulsion for his fellow human, he opened himself. “I’m doing this because I’m incapable not to,” he whispered. “I came here with you because you had lost everything. Years ago, when I lost everything, no one was good to me. At such times one can easily believe that nothing good can happen. I wanted to give you what no one gave me; I was watching you at your lowest and most hopeless, and I thought I could do one good thing. That’s something we still have, even when life crushes us, even when there’s nothing left; we can try to do one good thing.”

They wept in each other’s arms until it was no longer painful, and they started the walk toward Lake St. Louis.

After they had fished and eaten their lunch, Odahingum slowed down wiin’s pace to let Bridget open some distance ahead of them, and said to Samuel, “I don’t mean to intrude, but what was that discussion about?”

“You’ll find it very silly.”

“I wouldn’t think that of you.”

The sincerity in wiin’s voice touched a fiber in Samuel, and he savored the feeling until he remembered wiin still wanted an answer. “If you think the friars are bad, you should have met our parents. They convinced themselves that they were on a holy quest. They told us so many stories. We were supposed to stay alert against the dangers of this world. Dreadful things could happen if we didn’t leave Holland before the truce with Spain ended. We had to be prepared to flee into hiding before hordes of inquisitors came hunting for us.” He gave himself a moment to calm down as the memory of childhood terrors resurfaced. “I guess when the truce ended, and nothing happened, the congregation lost much of their fervor.”

“But she didn’t.”

“She can’t. I shouldn’t blame her; this is what has sustained her all her life. She must hate me for betraying our elders.”

Wiin stayed in silence for a while. “Sometimes you do have to disagree with your elders.” Samuel’s face showed surprise, and wiin went on, “I don’t know what you have gone through. But I know about being surrounded by people who try to teach you to hate yourself.”

“When did something like that happen to you?”

“My father sent me to the mission school when I started to grow up and it became evident that I wasn’t going to become a woman or a man. My mother explained to him that I’d been born with two spirits, and he thought that meant I was possessed.”

Samuel shuddered. “The friars must’ve been no better help.”

“I survived.”

“That word is too small for the meaning it has to carry.”

Odahingum had an inkling of a lifetime of suffering behind that reply. “Earlier, you wanted to know whether I hated you.”

“If you knew the dirty trickery that sent us here—”

“I’m not interested in whom you have lied to,” wiin said, extending a hand to hold Samuel’s. “Today, you have let me see more of the truth about you.”

Samuel felt his blood race with a pleasant warmth, but his first impulse was to resist it. “The whole truth about me may be too much.”

Odahingum, with wiin’s hand still on his, gave it the gentlest squeeze. “Let me have it. All of it. Let me be someone who doesn’t hate you.”

Morning, May 16 (Gregorian), 1637

Lake St. Louis

On the way north they met an old friend of Odahingum’s, a fellow Ojibwe, who had recently passed by the settlement ahead of them to sell fox skins and assured wiin that it was not currently besieged by plague. In fact, according to him, the Jesuits were busy expanding their presence in the region, building mission after mission in a frantic effort to avert another disaster of the proportions they’d seen in China. Even if it meant coming face to face with the Protestants in New Netherland and Nova Dania, they were determined to not fail again.

The man also told wiin, and wiin translated for the Fullers, that the Jesuits had built a stone bridge across the river that led to the lake, to connect the disparate houses that surrounded it. It was by no means as big a lake as the Ontario, but the river was nonetheless wide, and with the bridge it was now possible to start thinking of those houses as the seed of a future city.

For that information, Odahingum gave him two beavers wiin’d trapped back upstream, and they resumed their journey.

They came to know that they were close, even when still no houses were visible to them, by the fervorous reverberation of a voice that could only correspond to a sermon. They walked past squirrels and hares that ran from their approach but had until then seemed oblivious to the resounding stories of hell and perdition, and the closer they came to the settlement, the more horrific the words became. They still couldn’t see who was issuing such threats, but Samuel, who for the past days had been stealing short glances at Odahingum to savor the multiple beauty of wiin’s face, noticed at once that wiin’s countenance had changed.

It was, in truth, all wiin could do to contain wiin’s fury. As they went on through the forest and toward the mission house that must be the origin of those words, wiin grew increasingly angrier until they reached the clearing where the arch of the bridge began, and the description of the torments of hellfire resounded clear and loud with the gruesome enumeration of all the body parts through which the devil’s servants would insert torture implements to those among the listeners who persisted in rejecting the good news. Odahingum could barely keep wiinself from bursting into rage, running across the bridge and hurling a knife at that preacher’s throat.

“Is something wrong?” Samuel asked wiin.

“Everything about missionaries is wrong.”

Bridget took a moment to pay attention to the sermon and said, “I don’t have much sympathy for Catholics myself, but hell is very real.”

She spoke with such conviction that wiin couldn’t help but laugh, and the laugh made the fire inside wiin subside. “Your people have a really low opinion of the Great Spirit.”

It took her a second to infer that le Grand Esprit was the way the Jesuits had understood and named the god of the Ojibwe. The apostle Paul had employed a similar tactic with the Greeks, speaking to them in their own terms. And she wondered, if the priests were following so biblical an approach, what could have gone so wrong for them in China.

Odahingum started walking down the slope that led to the bridge. “Well, you’ve seen what they’re like. Do you still think you want to come?”

Unwilling to drop the matter, but aware that she ought not to give their guide cause to leave them stranded, Bridget turned to Samuel. “You can’t pretend we’re not here to finish our parents’ mission.” She was whispering in Dutch, but with an urgency that made Odahingum turn wiin’s head back at them in obvious disbelief. She conjectured Samuel could have been teaching wiin some Dutch during the journey.

Samuel replied, in the same tone, “Never learned to stop chewing at a meatless bone?”

She pointed at Odahingum. “Don’t we have a responsibility for her?”

His patience was wearing thin. “First, how on Earth are we responsible for a full-grown adult who has, in fact, prevented us from starving for the past weeks? And second, the word is wiin.”

“Oh, please. You don’t even know what that word means.”

“It has meaning for wiin, so I’ll keep using it.”

She sighed. “That… person, as well as every other Native, is in a state of spiritual darkness.”

He decided he’d had enough. “You’ve been fishing and eating and walking and sleeping next to wiin every day. Are you honestly going to tell me you’ve sensed even the faintest trace of evil in wiin? Because I’ve never in all my years met anyone as sure-footed, as open-handed, as truthful, as capable, as wide awake or as fully human as—” He had to stop, for he’d just noticed he was in love.

“Say what you will of earthly virtues, but I’m talking of the preservation of the true faith.”

“Meatless bone, I tell you.”

“It was our parents’ and therefore our calling.”

“Calling!” he exclaimed, and Odahingum, who by this point was already halfway across the bridge, stopped and turned around.

“What’s this now?” wiin asked in French.

“Bridget is convinced we’re major figures in God’s plan.”

Such a statement was empty sounds to wiin’s ears, and wiin resumed walking.

Samuel went on, “What do you suppose we’ll do when we’re settled among the French? Do you plan to convert them away from Rome?”

“They deserve that opportunity.”

“Oh, you think you’d be doing them a favor?”

“No, I’d be freeing them—”

“You,” Samuel began, and by that syllable alone she could tell he was furious, “have no clue of what freedom means. You dare speak not one word to me about freedom.”

He turned away from her to follow their guide on the bridge, but she refused to give up and went after him. “I’ll ask you your own question. What will you do when we settle?”

Without looking back, he replied, “Me? I only know one way to live. I deal with the world I find myself in. Not the next one. This.” He expected a protest but heard none. “I’d gladly show you how I do it, but I can’t help you if you insist on thinking you’re too special for it.”

That hurt her. She needed a minute alone to recover. She lagged behind and stood at her end of the bridge, sorting out her thoughts. Above everything else, it bothered her that Samuel could see into her with that much acuity. Tired of suppressing tears, her gaze fell on the image of herself that the river gave her, and she contemplated it for a good while, until a shape moved deep in the water, darkening the reflected sun.

“There’s something in the river,” she cried out in French, and the others looked over the edge of the bridge.

“I know that shape,” muttered Samuel, and before he had time to recall from where, something resembling a log emerged above the water, and it rotated, as if driven by a will, until he saw its end and the hole in it. “It’s a cannon!” he screamed, but his voice was lost in the explosion, and they felt the stony arch shake under their feet, and when a cloud of dust erupted at the point where it met the other shore, he felt a surge of panic. “Bridget, run back!” he yelled, but the second shot silenced the warning, and his cousin was engulfed in another burst of stone and dust.

With both ends destroyed, the middle of the bridge collapsed. Finding wiinself suddenly thrown into cold water, Odahingum hurried to the surface to take air. Wiin grabbed Samuel and struggled to swim away from the rubble and back to the last place they’d seen Bridget. Still another explosion followed, but they dared not look in what direction it had aimed, and it was only when they reached dry land that they saw, on the opposite shore, what the cannon was doing: house by house, the Jesuit mission was being destroyed.

Samuel crawled toward a tree, trying to not make himself too visible. Still shaking from the cold, he strained his sight and his brains, until the shadow submerged beneath the cannon found its match in his memory. “I know that shape!”

Odahingum joined him by the tree and stared at him, not understanding. “What is it?”

“It’s something I saw in Amsterdam. It’s a ship!”

“A ship that goes under the water?” Wiin tried to approach the river to get a better look at what lurked beneath the cannon.

Samuel snatched wiin by the arm and dragged wiin back behind the tree. “You’re lucky it’s pointing at the town, for we’d be dead if it’d seen us.”

“You say you know what that is. What that is makes no sense.”

“When I saw the design, I found it ridiculous too. I didn’t see what the point was of building a ship that was all closed, without masts or sails. But now I see it. It’s the perfect way to attack and remain unseen.”

Wiin felt revulsion for the idea. “Who is capable of waging war by such deception?”

The cannonballs kept falling on the last house standing. The wails of the injured now filled the forest like the dreadful preaching had minutes before.

Samuel let himself fall on his knees, overwhelmed by the noise and the ideas dancing in his mind. He thought of searching for Bridget, but he deemed it unlikely that she would have survived the blast. “I… I saw it on some papers. I couldn’t read what they said; Bridget thought the design was Danish.” And that last bit sparked another chain of ideas.

Odahingum chanced a quick glance around the tree, at the remains of the bridge. “We must go to the town and assist the wounded.”

“Wait,” said Samuel.

“They’ve stopped shooting.” Indeed, the cannon disguised as a piece of driftwood had gone back into hiding, and the dark shape seemed to be heading north, to the more open waters of the lake proper. At its sides long lines moved in rhythm, resembling huge paddles.

“No, wait. I’m thinking.” Many pieces in his head were falling into place, in a puzzle he had until then not suspected existed. “That ship’s Danish. All this time, it was not the Dutch, but the Danish. This explains how they’ve gained control of the oceans.”

Odahingum found that unlikely. “The oceans are the province of the Dutch. That’s the word everywhere.”

“That’s what we can see above the water, but who knows how many Danish vessels are hiding deep below. They’ve been the ones who’ve been sinking Spanish galleons with impunity, and now they’re starting to come for the French possessions.”

Wiin shook wiin’s head. “I’ve never known the Danish to be warlike. Wherever they go, they go as traders.”

“Yes, in their regular ships. But with these, they can go where no one else—” His voice froze as his head made another connection, and the new weight on his lungs took several overexcited breaths to clear. “This is how they trade with China! This is how the Danish managed to open the Arctic route: their ships don’t break through the ice, but pass underneath it.”

Odahingum still felt the need to examine the river. Samuel no longer stopped wiin; his head was busy exploring the implications of what he’d deduced. Odahingum kneeled by the shore and smelled the water. There was a whiff of tar that set wiin on alert. Looking closely at the surface of the water, wiin caught sight of several fish swimming with difficulty and others that appeared to be dying. Wiin whispered, remembering an old tale, “They carry the face of death.”

Samuel approached wiin and asked, “Who does?”

Wiin stood up and mulled over the problem for a second. “It’s complicated to explain to you. You carry the face of friendship. But here,” wiin pointed at the river, “the water is killing the fish.”

“Do you think it has to do with that ship?”

Wiin nodded. “It must be the cannon. I’ve heard people from the tribes along the coast say they’ve found portions of the sea where the fish rot and nothing can be eaten. This must be the cause. The explosions are rupturing their insides.”

“The Danish probably don’t even know they’re doing this.”

“Ruining our food is as good as declaring war on us.”

Samuel felt alarmed, and upon examining his feeling, he saw that he had once again failed to escape the ruthless greed of the European wars, and hoped fervently that Odahingum wouldn’t count him as one of the enemy. “What are you going to do?”

Wiin understood the intent of the question, and said, “Don’t worry about me. I don’t fight. The Marten clan fights.”

“And you?”

Wiin smiled, thinking of the winding roads of fate. “It’s funny. I should have been Marten clan, but I already told you what happened with my father and the school. When I returned to the Ojibwe, I was adopted by the Bird clan. We are speakers. Messengers.”

“So now you’re going to warn your people.”

“Yes. If the Danish are planning an invasion, we must make our own plans. Maybe you should warn the French.”

They turned toward the ruined bridge, trying to decide how they were going to cross to the other shore, when Samuel’s gaze locked onto a red blotch in the water that could only be from Bridget’s body. Once more he fell to his knees, filled with regret, hating himself for having taken her so far from home to die.

Odahingum placed a hand on his shoulder. “The river has not carried her away. We’re going to have to move the rubble from over her body. Then I can join you in praying for her spirit, if you wish.”

Being comforted was a feeling Samuel had not expected, nor did he recognize it at first. The warmth of that hand was going a long way toward soothing his grief. “I’m not much the praying kind,” he said, standing up. “But I can ask one of the priests to come over here. She needs a decent burial.” Then he noticed the hand was still on his shoulder, and to his own surprise, he didn’t mind it.

“It was a mistake to have brought you here. I’m sorry for everything.”

“No. You didn’t order that ship to fire.” He looked into wiin’s eyes and saw there an openness that allowed him to be open himself, and felt awash with gratitude and relief. “Actually, you’ve been the best part of what has happened here. You’re the only person I’ve ever met from whom I have nothing to protect.”

Wiin smiled. “I was worried you might resent me for not finding you a place to settle.”

“I’ll keep looking. With you, I hope?”

“I’d like that.”

“Good. Now let’s go over there to see what can be done for those people.”

They swam across the river to the Jesuit settlement. They hoped their wet, disheveled looks would not cause their offer of help to be rejected. Not many had died, but those with broken bones and open wounds were numerous. While Odahingum gathered roots and leaves to make remedies against the pain and the infection, Samuel went to the group gathered around the remains of the mission house to find someone to pray for Bridget. He was pointed in the direction of the superior of their mission, one Father Le Jeune, and by his voice Samuel knew immediately he’d been the one who’d been tormenting the forest with his infernal condemnations. That could be of use, as the man’s piety should impel him to offer help to a stranger. However, when Samuel, still trying to shake off the cold of the river and the water in his clothes, described the circumstances in which they had found themselves under cannon fire, the priest grew suspicious.

“You said her name was Bridget? That’s not quite a French name.”

“That’s right: we’re English. Descended from English, more precisely; we used to live in the Netherlands. And then the New Netherlands. Our lives are complicated, you see.”

Le Jeune narrowed his eyes. “Was your cousin a Catholic?”

Samuel hesitated. If he lied, he might ensure the priest’s good will, but he would also be dishonoring what had mattered to her more than anything. “Is that relevant?”

“Definitely. The Church does not allow holy rites for a heretic.”

“But didn’t God make her too?”

“Yes, of course, but she chose to turn her back on Him. If she died without repenting from the mortal sin of heresy, there’s nothing we can do for her.”

At that moment Samuel saw himself holding in his tongue the key to the world’s balance. He considered whether he should reveal to Le Jeune, and thus to the entire faction of Catholic powers, the true nature of Denmark’s secret weapon. He saw himself as standing before a long stretch of the future, and closing his eyes, chose to not walk it. “Then I’m turning my back on you.”

Ignoring the priest’s confused expression, he exited the settlement. He swam back the way they had come and started digging with his hands.

Hours later, when he was done helping the injured, Odahingum joined Samuel by the makeshift grave. “They didn’t want to help?”

Samuel shook his head. “I know I can’t ask you to give my cousin your manner of burial, but can you help me make a tomb?”

Wiin started digging by his side. “What happened with the friars?”

“Unless they get help from high above, they’ll be obliterated by the Danish navy, and they just proved to me that they deserve to be.”

“What? You didn’t tell them of the ship?”

“No, and I hope you didn’t.”

“No, I was busy treating wounds.”

“Good. Let them face the future on their own.”

“Can you condemn them to a needless death?”

Samuel stopped to look at the dirt he was digging into, then stared at wiin. “Death is always needless. But I’m tired of being in the middle of this absurdity. I wish I could just let Catholics and Protestants slit each other’s throats and leave me in peace.”

After pushing Bridget into the tomb, they started moving earth back in. “Samuel, come with me.”

“Where?”

“To my people. I have to talk to them anyway. The French aren’t really my concern either, but I can’t let the Ojibwe be unprepared for what’s coming.”

Samuel’s hands paused as he let every strand of his being accept the invitation. “I’d love to go with you. What you have showed me is worth more than all I thought I’d learned.”

“Is that behind you now?”

“Yes. Even in the middle of all this death, even knowing that more death will descend on this land, I’m ready to let go of all of it. I’m ready to go with you.”

Wiin stepped in front of him, embraced him closely, and gave him a kiss. And the two of them, after burying Bridget by the end of the demolished bridge by Lake St. Louis, started the walk to the nearby lands of the Ojibwe, where Odahingum relayed what wiin’d seen while visiting the French, and Samuel, for the years that remained of his life, could finally forget about murderous quarrels and warships and slavery and greedy empires and disputes of faith.

Part 2: Setback

Things that appear unrelated actually have some sort of natural link.

Cicero, On Divination

It is beneath God’s majesty to know how many gnats are born every second.

Saint Jerome, Commentaries on the Minor Prophets

Night, June 7 (Gregorian), 1610

La Flèche

Every student was required to attend the Mass for the assassinated king.

A four-day procession had brought his heart from Paris, as the late Henri had wished. The school had been chosen as the last stop in the nation’s public act of mourning, as well as a posthumous gesture of reconciliation in a hard time. No higher endorsement could have been made in favor of the Jesuit Order than handing over to their custody the heart of a repentant Huguenot. The years of royal banishment had ceased; the standing of the Order was secure.

Upon walking out of the school chapel, his ears numb from an entire week of hymns, René du Perron saw Father Charlet standing alone in the playground, thinking. A distant relative of his mother’s, the rector had been a caring mentor, even granting René dispensation from morning prayers and exercises out of consideration for his health. The young René would never be quite weaned from that penchant for having his elders make exceptions to the rules for his sake.

He approached Father Charlet with slow steps, curious but fearful of disturbing what looked like a deeply private moment. An evening drizzle had showered the school, and the earth, under the waning moonlight, shone with the muddy footprints of the boys who were still leaving Mass for their bedrooms. They went past Charlet without noticing the worried expression shown on his face. It occurred to René that, were it not for the sound of shoes against slushy ground, he might almost hear what the man’s thoughts were.

René waited for the others to leave and walked toward the rector with caution. “Good evening, Father,” he ventured, before realizing he had been seen coming.

“Good evening, Monsieur du Perron. You want to tell me something? A moment ago it seemed to me that His Majesty’s death must have particularly saddened you.”

René didn’t know what to say to that. He wasn’t expecting to be the one whose personal feelings would be discussed. It was true that the school existed due to the late king’s generosity, and the building itself had once been his home. But to a student, or to anyone who was his same age, that mattered little.

“It is written that we all have to die,” he replied, staring firmly at his shoes.

The rector’s shadow on the ground shifted and René looked up. He was smiling now. “This isn’t catechism. You don’t need to parrot an answer I already know if you didn’t hear me ask in Latin.”

René liked it when teachers respected his intelligence as an equal’s, but one part of him had grown mature enough to question whether he might be getting a bit too accustomed to such treatment. “Forgive me, Father. I thought you might be pondering mysteries in the heavens.”

Charlet gave a reluctant nod. “Death is the one mystery we can’t contemplate.”

That answer did not satisfy René; he had seen him at other funerals. “If death is always unfathomable, why is a king’s stranger than a peasant’s?”

“Because peasants are not chosen by God, but kings are. It pleased God to save Henri when one of my Order tried to kill him, and it pleased Him to allow a poor lost soul to succeed at the attempt this time. Since ours is not a God of disorder, His decrees always carry some meaning.”

“But don’t all of us die by His decree? Surely my death will have a meaning, too?”

The priest closed his eyes. The only reason he had wanted fresh air in the first place was that the king’s death had reminded him of another, less significant one, that should not have troubled anyone’s mind, but had obsessed philosophers for years. The tale might benefit René, but first he needed to remember his duties. Even a true teaching at the wrong time could put his soul in eternal danger. “Quae sunt virtutes contra superbiam?”

“Sunt humilitas et obedientia.”

“Good. Now that we’re done with formalities, I have a tale for you, and a lesson. Before I begin, I must warn you that this is very advanced theology, but I feel it may be what you need now.”

“It won’t harm me, Father. I’m listening.”

The rector wished that René didn’t have so much eagerness to know things beyond his comprehension. Faith, as defined by Trent, precluded all curiosity. He asked himself whether it would be wise to go ahead and tell the story, but seeing the effect of its mere promise, not telling it seemed now the worse option. “Have you heard about the Congregatio de Auxiliis?”

“I have not, Father.”

“Few books exist discussing that topic. There was a disagreement, years ago, between the Order of Preachers and us, about free will and predestination. We hold that humans are free to accept or reject God’s gift of salvation, but the Dominicans have been deceived by the lies of Luther, who denied free will.”

“I would have liked to hear that discussion.”

“No, it went on for too long. It was cause for much bitterness. We even accused each other of heresy. In the end, the Pope decided to cease the debate. He forbade all new books on the matter. But he declined to say which side had won.”

“Why? The answer was clear. Your position was supported by natural reason.”

“Yes, but they had Augustine and Thomas.”

René bit his tongue to avoid saying that high authorities should not matter. “It must have been hard to argue with them.”

Charlet nodded. “Hard indeed. Moreover, the debate branched out to germane issues. To prove or disprove predestination, we had to cover the nature of time, the properties of divine foreknowledge, the number of types of the gift of grace, the limits of unaided human choice, the truth value of counterfactual claims, every shred of Scriptural evidence, and the other side’s counterarguments. It was fascinating, but exhausting.”

“Were any new doctrines formulated?” asked René, with evident excitement.

“That is not what philosophy is for! Now pay attention, Monsieur du Perron, to what I’m trying to explain to you.”

“Forgive me, Father. I’ll keep listening.”

“Our discussions on God’s supreme judgment were stalled by a needless controversy. In the middle of deliberations, one of the Dominican debaters forced us to hear an obscure incident he had been told while teaching in England. He said he had been so impressed by it, so moved to long nights of meditation, that he took all his speculative work to be worth nothing in the face of our fundamental helplessness in the world. He said it demonstrated beyond doubt that we are as clay in the hands of God, and that any pretension of freedom on our part is a foolish illusion. Keep in mind, he had already become a moderately successful scholar on all manners of doctrinal dispute. He told us he had planned to write much more, and he renounced all that after hearing the story that you are going to hear. He left England and did penance to be reconciled with the Order of Preachers. They were happy to have him back, because this friar was nothing short of brilliant.” He saw with delight the expectation on René’s face and continued speaking. “In England, when that most detestable Elizabeth reigned, there was a Satan-spawned corsair she was bestowing honors upon. During the rite, a bridge broke up, and a hundred people fell to the Thames. The unforeseen mishap harmed no nobles, but it did cause the death of one low-born. He couldn’t have been much older than you; he was barely an apprentice sailor. But you cannot conceive of how many tomes of treatises and commentaries have been wasted by that apostate Church of England in dissecting the meaning of one random, accidental demise.” He stopped talking when he saw René’s face. “Are you feeling well, Monsieur du Perron?”

“Why are you telling me this?” he pled.

The rector feared for the boy’s peace of mind, but the lesson still needed to be taught. “That Dominican monk used the story as part of a bigger point about fate. Even one of our Order, Molina, had already addressed that incident not long after its occurrence. His book on divine foreknowledge alludes to it. You ask what’s so odd about a king’s death; these men asked the same of a commoner’s. Why did God bother to smite this sailor? Could his undone deeds have offended Him? And that led to even deeper questions: do the futures that don’t happen exist? Does it even have a meaning to speak of events that can and yet will not be?”

René looked like he was mulling the same. “Anything that God foresees, must happen.”

“And still, the entire life He had foreseen in the future of this boy, He erased. So we discussed: does an erased event retain its reality in God’s mind? We reached no firmer conclusions than had been posed on the same topic years before, but I’m saying all this to you because it provides a great illustration of the importance of trusting God’s judgment. He always wills the best for His children, so His interventions in history always lead to the best of all outcomes. His infinite wisdom once deemed it best that an unimportant sailor should die, and we must believe that He found the same to be true for our beloved Henri.”

René remained silent. He was trying not to let his face show how horrified he was at Father Charlet’s suggestion that a boy’s death could be the best outcome. He lowered his head and muttered his thanks.

Father Charlet was not wholly convinced. “There is a right lesson to learn from this, but there is always also a wrong one. Guard your faith against fear of the future, for God will be watching over your life.” René thanked him again, and the rector appeared satisfied this time. “Good night, then. Do remember Henri in your prayers.” He imparted his blessing on the boy and left for his quarters, visibly pleased. He congratulated himself on how he had maneuvered the conversation.

René stayed in the playground with his thoughts, looking at his blurred shadow on the wet earth.

Midnight, November 10 (Gregorian), 1619

Neuburg an der Donau

Christendom was clawing at its own neck, and René du Perron, now Descartes, with only a stove heater to stay warm, was having a long and difficult night. A soldier in name only, he’d been spared the rigors of training and of battle; as he had very often in the past, he had secured exceptional treatment, been given the freedom sufficient to write and ample space for private reflection. He’d been studying the Book of the World by throwing himself between the pages, but the chain of thoughts of the past few hours was keeping his mind too busy to rest. It was as if his conscience had not been truly awake until that cold night, and he no longer found it in himself to stand amid the carnage of the world and not burst into tears every minute. He was already, by temperament, in disagreement with all things senseless, and the countless deaths in the service of a God whose preferences were silent offended every strand of his being. His entire life, since that conversation with Father Charlet all those years ago, had been obsessed with the thought of that boy who had drowned in the Thames for no reason. Now that he had witnessed war, it seemed that every fallen soldier was another child randomly thrown into the water by the inscrutable whim of Heaven. Trying to fall asleep made him feel guilt before those who would not awake anymore, and he wondered what dreams he’d be having instead, were that tale not lodged in his mind. Trembling with cold, his eyes fixed on the stove, he didn’t notice when his thoughts drifted.

He saw the flames fill the sky with their light and twist the fabric of the heavens, forcing everything into motion. The world was governed by the sun, and the sun answered to no one. Life grew in patient silence under its rays. The days were long, the nights were warm, the years were all equal. Time went on by a single rule. René didn’t know where the feeling came from that was screaming at him that everything was being wasted. The screams ended when the sun gave birth, and millions of hands held millions of little flames in them, and René was caressed by a wave of contentment that gently opened his eyes. He wrapped himself tighter and once again fell asleep.

His next dream was less pleasant. Now he felt enveloped in smoke, and the smoke weighed like a fist against his face, pushing him upward without respite, and he thought he could see in the distance a lake where perhaps he could hide, but as soon as he dove, he found the water boiling. The surface lit up, as if by a lamp, and he was hurled to the sky by a whirlwind that spun in both directions at the same time. He was in the middle of a storm and he dreaded the moment of lightning. But it never arrived; beneath the lake, tiny sparks tried to break free, as if the might of the storm had been tamed and held captive. All the sparks shone at once and the night was no more.

René woke up with a burning sensation lingering in his eyes. The back of his neck was tingling with goosebumps and the tips of his fingers were pierced by invisible needles. He sat up and breathed. His bed was right next to the stove, but he was shivering. He removed his blanket and felt it damp with his sweat. He stood up and walked to the door, hoping that the late autumn air would suffice to lull him back into sleep. He closed his eyes, leaned on the door, and welcomed the cold draft entering from beneath. It spread through his bones and became one with him. Plato had said that the atoms of fire were tetrahedrons, but when had he or anyone seen an atom? René imagined every fire atom in his body slowly shedding its heat, turning into something else. The vision filled his mind’s eye, and a sole, fixed idea took possession of him. Atoms disintegrated one after another, but what smaller parts could be conceived? He concentrated on the imprecise image of one atom of fire, losing all its heat until there remained… what could remain? What lay beneath the veil of substance? The atom in his mind’s eye had no clear geometry, and that bothered him to the point of despair. He saw yes and no dancing around each other, he saw an infinite chain of such couples dancing together, he saw the universe as a dance hall traversed by the faint reverberations of a long-forgotten melody, he saw the eternal sphere of heaven grow a crack that pulled the fixed stars apart, he saw the sky dotted with blinking lamps like a tapestry made of live fireflies, he saw the lights appear and fade and appear and fade and appear and fade, he saw the lights merging, he saw yes and no locked in a forbidden embrace, he saw the face of darkness mocking him in cruel laughter, and he heard the space inside his head crack with the sound of God’s foot stomping on the sins of mortals.

He was still leaning against the door, and the intensity of the sound he’d just heard shook him to his knees. He took air and looked around, intuiting that he ought to be looking for something, but not finding it. Meaning to run, he staggered back to the bed, unsure of the meaning of his visions. He forced himself to lie very still, to not risk another thought intruding into his consciousness. After some minutes of such effort, he was so exhausted that he forgot what he was trying to do and his mind collapsed into a heavy slumber. But anyone who would have sneaked into that room would still have seen the concern in his face. Even in sleep, he knew he would never be able to forget that night, and he knew he would try many times. It was the kind of experience that built a man, and he felt demolished, as if he were five times his age. The sound of the drizzle outside made the inside of his eyelids flash.

Afternoon, November 26 (Gregorian), 1621

Elbe river

René could feel, beneath his sitting body, the continual sway of the boat as the drivers picked at the half-frozen water but barely made any progress toward his destination. He’d had enough of the Book of the World; he’d seen enough of humanity as it stubbornly insisted on being. Their laboriously slow movement on the river would have irritated any man less tired than he felt from his years as a spectator to civilization’s avid ingestion of itself.

He looked at his reflection on the water at the exact moment a stray ripple went across it. His thoughts followed after, and he admitted to feeling glad for the chance to empty his mind from all the hatred and greed and zeal and vindictiveness he’d forced himself to witness in his journey. He was sick of things that made no sense; and in the world he had chanced to be born in, that applied to all things.

He was half-aware of his assistant, sitting next to him, and of the boat drivers conversing in a hush-toned Frisian he could understand but did not care to pay attention to. At some point, one of them made a gesture with his arm in the general direction of the luggage, and René imagined they were worried that the weight might unbalance the boat while they tried to maneuver through the ice, but he was so absorbed in his own worries that he couldn’t open a space in his head to follow the conversation.

His image in the water had barely recomposed itself when another ripple blurred it again, and after more repetitions and more watching, the thought occurred to him that at every given moment, some corner of his liquid mirror had to be distorted, that it was not possible to see his face complete. Wave after wave swept over the false René on the surface, reverberating like approaching footsteps. He saw himself looking at himself from the bottom of the river and thought, one more time, as he had inevitably done all his life whenever his mind was permitted to drift on its own, about that English boy whose story he’d heard from Father Charlet. At least the boy was spared the chaos of this world, René whispered quietly at his double. His journey across the battlefields of Christendom had hardly been worth the years of astonished terror. What had he learned? For what gain had he left the quiet life of the mind? Sometimes he could sense a faint intuition that there was a big lesson hidden in what he had seen and lived, but its truth was not open for him to reach. He felt as if a muddy veil enveloped his mind, forever blocking his sight from what he yearned to discover, even if he had gathered all the facts he needed. It was impossible for him to take the definitive step toward a clear and certain conclusion: his view of the world was already tainted by the despair implied in that English boy’s uncaused, nonsensical death. If it had been possible for him to die for no reason, then there was no reason for anything. It sufficed to have news of one single event that was purely, incontestably devoid of sense for the entire world to be robbed of sense. What then? That juvenile obsession with a life whose bearer had never lived and whom he had never known was a roadblock in his life’s work; at the root of his thirst for understanding was also the poison that blinded his search. What land could he go to, where that persistent worm of digested and excreted thoughts would cease to chase after him? The prospect of spending his remaining years unable to shake that old story off his mind made him feel dizzy with weightlessness.

He believed he could actually feel the weightlessness, feel the boat push him up, feel the river lift them all in the air; and the next moment he heard a splash, looked behind him and saw that the boat drivers had thrown his assistant into the water. One of them was about to jump at him and the other was casting a greedy eye at the luggage.

The shock made him react too slowly. By the time he remembered his training and moved his hand to the hilt of his sword, the first man was already grabbing him by the shoulders and preparing to throw him too. René wasted another precious second in refocusing on the fight; his mind was refusing to leave the comfortable realm of his ruminations and was still too sluggish to respond properly, and he didn’t regain full control of his attention until he was flying overboard and crashing against the floating ice. He tried to hold on to it, but its cold, slick surface numbed his hands and made them useless for grasping anything. In his mind the fear that he’d be unable to swim up if he sank into the icy water crashed with the realization that he was slipping and he couldn’t do anything to stop it. He slowly and inevitably slid across the ice toward the water, and both his boots, now wet and heavy, and his arms, clothed in fur that swept like a brush on the smooth ice, accelerated his fall until he submerged. The cold seized his muscles with merciless speed, and he found himself unable to move, either to find firm footing at the bottom or to swim back to the surface. Before he reached the river’s deep bottom, he lost all sensation in his body, lost track of how much he had sunk, lost count of how long he had tried to hold his breath, and soon afterwards lost all notion of what his thoughts were.

Part 3: Descent

God knows possible futures that will not happen.

Luis de Molina, Concord Between Human Freedom and Divine Foreknowledge

“Possible” does not mean “insufficiently real.”

Duns Scotus, Lecture I 39

Morning, January 3 (Julian), 1626

London

Ever since old Henry, forever accursed be his memory, had parted ways with Rome, the kingdoms of England and Spain seemed doomed to clash like dueling rams, neither side ceding an inch, neither side making progress. A mighty Spanish fleet had failed already, in spectacularly disastrous manner, to regain England for the Church; a full generation later, England was still repaying in kind, only to be met with an equal measure of catastrophe. The return of the defeated warships to London was not, however, to be the sorriest affair of the year.

Cornelis Drebbel was yanked from his sleep by the sound of cannons. He jumped out of bed, awaking his wife, and ran to the window, which looked over the Thames, and saw legions of foreign ships destroying the British navy and starting to fire on the Parliament. The unexpected attack, vicious beyond measure, shook him awake but left his senses still confounded. His wife sat up in alarm when another cannon fired. Looking at the enemy ships, he recognized the colors of the Danish flag, but that information alone meant little. No rumors had been heard about a war, much less one with a fellow Protestant country. He couldn’t think of a reason why King Christian would all of a sudden decide to capture London with such ferocity. He was joined at the window by his wife, who was as dumbfounded as he was by the invasion. His mind was in the middle of a frantic search for explanations when, beneath the echo of the explosions and the screams of people, the sound of a lock being forced open reached them from downstairs.

He considered the window, but there was nothing on the street to cushion their fall. He thought of dragging his bed to block the door, but the fear of approaching it held him paralyzed until a kick threw the door down, revealing half a dozen tall soldiers dressed in a uniform unknown to him and a richly dressed old lady whose face showed open admiration.

“Be proud, Cornelis,” she said in oddly accented German. “The kingdom is being conquered just for you.”

The soldiers took them both out of the house and made them walk in a specific path around the ongoing gunfights, avoiding the direction of the shots, which made him suspect there had been meticulous planning behind their movements. The route took them across panicked backstreets to the docks, where the flagship of the kingdom of Denmark and Norway awaited.

Not a word was said during the long walk, but when they boarded the ship, the lady leaned to speak into his ear, “Don’t be afraid. Killing you is the farthest thing from their minds.”

He asked, feeling confused in the extreme, “Who wants us? Who are you?”

“I’m an admirer of your work. It was my idea to come and fetch you. But the credit for disguising the whole operation under a full-blown annexation of England goes to my son.”

Before he could ask any more questions, one soldier took his wife away and another grabbed his arms and forced him to walk the stairs to a lower deck, where he entered a room decorated with the Danish coat of arms. There, on a half-broken chair, his head covered in thick blots of dry blood, sat Charles of the House of Stuart, until that day king of England, Scotland and Ireland. Upon recognizing him, Cornelis began to make a reverence, but the soldier who had brought him seized his torso and kept him standing. “You will never again bow before him,” he threatened.

The old lady entered the room through another door, joined by a man Cornelis had never seen but whose name he could guess: Christian of the House of Oldenburg, maternal uncle of Charles and for the past thirty years king of Denmark and Norway. And if he was her son, then she had to be Sophie of Mecklenburg-Güstrow, famous for the insatiable reading that made her the best-informed woman in Europe. Cornelis had the disquieting sense that, were she not advising Christian on this plan, her grandson Charles would by that hour have been executed.

The soldier kicked him on the inside of his knees to make him drop to the floor. “Bow to him. He’s your king now.”

Christian made a gesture, and Cornelis was pulled back up. “Mr. Drebbel,” he said in worse German than his mother’s, “I’ve gone to considerable trouble to find you. Let’s get started on good terms.”

A chair was presented to him that he dared not refuse. “Where is my wife?”

“I assure you she is perfectly safe,” said the king. “Don’t worry at all. She doesn’t need to take part in our discussion.”

“I have children. They live in our house. They must be worried about us.”

“I know about your children, Mr. Drebbel. I repeat: do not worry.”

The way Christian stressed his reply soothed none of his fears. Christian murmured an order to a soldier, and Charles was taken out of the room. “What’s going to happen to him?” asked Cornelis.

“A deposed king is no one’s concern,” said Christian. “You’re going to work for me.” He sat in front of Cornelis and adopted a gentler tone. “You must be scared to death. I bet you didn’t like being awakened by my cannons. But I ask you to keep in mind at all times that I intend absolutely no harm to you, your wife, or your children. In this conquest, you are the most important treasure.”

“Why? What did I do?”

Sophie replied, “You opened the way to Denmark’s greatness. We’re going to build the most powerful empire that history has seen, and we hope you’ll be proud to know it will be thanks to you.”

That wasn’t the answer he was asking for, but they didn’t seem to be refusing his questions. “What do you want of me?”

Sophie smiled, seeing a breakthrough. “The future of Denmark will be built from the exploits of two great discoverers. One of them is you. The other you must have heard about.”

Christian drew out a roll of paper and extended it on a table. It was a map of the frozen north seas, with points marked in red ink all over the Asian coast. “Do you recognize this?”

Cornelis examined the route implied by the sequence of red points and recalled a huge piece of news from years before. “You’re talking about Jens Munk!” He looked in disbelief at the king, shocked at the ease with which he carried around the map of the world’s most coveted trading route. “This is the passage through the frozen seas. England would happily remove your head for this map.”

“That is why we came at this precise moment,” explained Sophie. “Our timing is not accidental. The British navy has just returned from Spain, exhausted and demoralized. God has granted us this moment.”

Cornelis pointed at the map. “Munk already gave you the Arctic route. You can already reach China faster than anyone. What do you want me for?”

The king replied, “You’re right that we have the strategic advantage. But we still haven’t solved the technical side of the problem. My mother can explain it better.”

“The Arctic route,” she began, taking a rod and tracing an imaginary line over the map, “stays open only for a few weeks in summer. If you try to sail through it, you have to make it quick or else you’ll remain trapped in ice until the next year. Those waters give us neither enough time nor enough maneuvering space between the icebergs to send a ship full of silver to China and have another return with Chinese goods in the same year. Ever since Munk discovered the route, we’ve sent numerous exploratory missions to chart all the islands, river mouths, and floating ice masses. I went on one of those trips. So far we’ve been unable to get past Mangazeya.”

Cornelis sought the name on the map. “Mangazeya… that’s a Russian port.”

“Not anymore,” said Christian, visibly pleased.

“What the expeditions have concluded,” Sophie resumed, “is that the Arctic is unusable for permanent commercial traffic. We’ve secured exclusive access to the most valuable of all shipping routes, but we can’t profit from it as long as the way stays iced shut.”

One thought followed another, and Cornelis shifted in his chair, uncomfortable at the role he guessed they were planning for him. “I’m by no means the only lens grinder you could’ve found. Don’t you have them in your own country? Any of them can make a mirror big enough to melt ice. Why come for me?”

“A mirror?” asked Christian.

“He’s thinking of Archimedes,” said Sophie. “He used reflected sunlight to burn enemy ships.”

The king turned toward her, greatly surprised. “And why aren’t we doing that?”

“Arctic sunlight is too weak,” she snapped. Then she turned to Cornelis, “We didn’t come because of your daily trade; we don’t need a lens grinder. You’re famous for more interesting reasons.” As he puzzled over which of his various pastimes she could have meant, she moved the tip of the rod over the whitish blotches in the map. “Instead of breaking through the ice, we’re going to take our ships beneath it.” Then she pointed at Cornelis. “You’ve already made a machine capable of such a feat, but King James was unable to appreciate the possibilities it created.”

Then he remembered. Six years before, he’d presented the king of England with a curiosity he’d designed: a closed boat, capable of navigating beneath the surface of the Thames. He’d even taken James with him on one of those rides. But that boat had been forgotten in the end.

Sophie seemed to guess his thoughts. “In fact, we know you’ve been having difficulty finding an employer wealthy enough to support your children. Those times are over, Cornelis. We’re going to give your invention a glorious use.”

Cornelis couldn’t resist feeling relief, mixed with apprehension. If now the king of Denmark was interested in his idea, an assignment to build an entire merchant fleet could buy him a lavish old age. There was, however, one issue he needed to stress first. “You didn’t need to go into these theatrics. You didn’t need to hold my wife hostage. I would’ve gladly taken this job. If we’re going to work together, we need to be clear on one thing: you will not keep my family as leverage.”

“The theatrics, I’m afraid, were necessary,” said Christian. “People like you tend to share information. People who make their living by building things depend on exchanging ideas and methods and designs; and you, Mr. Drebbel, are too well known. We couldn’t risk having you simply take a ship to Denmark; everyone who knows a thing about the tinkering profession would see you change employers and would immediately know what we wanted. Soon every kingdom would know too. No, we couldn’t have that. That’s why I orchestrated all this, and you can’t begin to fathom how hard it was. I went behind Parliament’s back and negotiated a deal with the Scottish lords to have their troops help me take over England in exchange for their autonomy. That way my true reasons remain hidden. With hundreds of Londoners dead today, no one will pause to ask what happened to you.”

That arrangement struck Cornelis as excessive to the point of absurdity. “All this just for a trade route that no one else can use anyway?”

“No, not just for that,” said Christian. “That would be a criminal underutilization of your skills. You’ll learn quickly that I’m nothing like the kings you’ve worked for until now. I have what this world so shamefully lacks: a vision.”

“Don’t say one more word until I’ve seen my wife and my children.” He felt so impatient that he almost headed for the door, but he was more terrified than his tone revealed.

Sophie whispered to her son, “Maybe this much coercion was improper.”

Christian stood up and addressed the soldiers. “Take him to see his wife. Bring him back when he’s satisfied that we’re not enemies.”

The king’s men led Cornelis to a room in the same deck, furnished to resemble the interior of a house. He saw his wife sitting on a couch and ran to embrace her. He heard her reassurances that she had not been treated badly before he noticed there was someone else in the room.

It was a middle-aged man, so thin he barely existed, from whose face hung the weight of an old exhaustion that preceded his gait. The way he leaned on his cane as he approached Cornelis betrayed that he suffered with every step; and his reluctant, gloved handshake trembled at the slightest stroke on its fingertips. Years of living in a city of sailors had taught Cornelis to recognize those signs. They meant nails lost to scurvy.

“It is an honor to meet someone of your stature,” said the stranger in a difficult English. The scurvy had also taken all his teeth.

Cornelis gave his wife a questioning look, and she said in Dutch, “Sit down with me.”

“Who are you?” he asked the man instead.

“My name is Jens Munk. I have been telling Mrs. Drebbel how much your work has impressed me.”

Cornelis sat down.

“I have a soft spot,” continued Munk, “for people of commoner rank who make something of themselves by their own effort.”

The implication that Jens Munk, a navigator whom Europe held in an esteem reserved for the likes of Da Gama and Columbus, thought of him as deserving of comparable praise made him want to burst with joy. But he remembered where he was, and remarked, “From the way we’ve been treated today, no one would suspect a whiff of admiration.”

Munk nodded sadly. “Such are the ways of nobles. Life has to move with intensity.”

“So I’ve seen. Is Christian trustworthy?”

Munk’s eyes moved in the direction of the soldiers, and Cornelis felt embarrassed. “He… means what he says,” he answered, stressing the words in a deliberate way. “Your ship designs play a crucial role in his expansion project.” He noticed the surprise that that piece of information had caused, and added, “This doesn’t stop at England. You’ll see.”

Cornelis turned to his wife. “What else have you heard about this?”

She shook her head. “About King Christian, nothing. I was asking him to tell me the tale of his year among the whale hunters.”

Cornelis had graver concerns on his mind, but he had to sympathize with her curiosity. Now that he knew her life was in no danger, they might as well take a minute to listen to the world’s greatest living sailor. His journey had become legend. After spending a deadly winter in the frozen shore of Hudson Bay, Munk had bravely taken his ship back toward Denmark, with only two surviving crewmen, but in the last leg of the way home, he’d famously headed north, beyond the end of Norway, to open around the old continent the Arctic passage he’d failed to find in the new.

“How much of the tale did I miss?”

“There isn’t much more to it,” said Munk. “I wouldn’t have survived Greenland without the help of the Tunumiit. I’d lost my men, my ship, and all my remaining food. The Tunumiit kept me warm and fed until I was able to build and steer my own kayak.”

“Did they teach you the route?” asked Mrs. Drebbel.

“The first part of it. They don’t need to go too far from their homes; the sea provides them with everything. I had to find the rest of the route on my own; when you’re that far north, compasses are useless. I didn’t reach the opening to the Pacific until the second summer since my detour.”

“Mr. Munk,” said Cornelis, “if my submersible ships are meant to cover the same spots you passed through in that heroic journey of yours, I don’t think anyone can hope for a higher privilege. It excites me to think of us working together for years to come. But at this exact moment I need to speak with the king and clarify the nature of my employment.”

Munk seemed worried by that idea. “Be prudent,” he said, mindful of the soldiers’ presence, and whispered in his ear, “I’ve had my disagreements with nobility before. As long as it remains commonly accepted that kings get what they want, the rest of us have to watch our tongues—and our backs.”

Holding onto his wife’s hand, Cornelis walked toward Christian’s chamber, but stumbled upon Sophie before getting there. She barely acknowledged him as she said, “My son is busy at the moment.”

“He bought my services with the lives of his men. I don’t think I’ll ever not be welcome.”

He attempted to walk past her, but she glared at the soldier who came with him, and he grabbed Cornelis. She drew closer to him until he could smell her perfume and warned, “Don’t let the fact that you’re indispensable get to your head. We’re only giving you the favored guest treatment until we no longer have to.” She savored the extinguishing of the fire in his eyes, and said, in a more neutral tone, “Let’s not be rude to each other. I’d rather continue to be your admirer without you giving me reason to regret it. So behave.”

“Why can’t I see the king?”

“Right now he’s introducing himself to the head of the British navy. That’s someone who mustn’t know you’re here.”

Cornelis understood the problem. Sir George Villiers, Duke of Buckingham, Master of the Horse and Lord High Admiral, was, in the absence of King Charles, the highest-ranking officer and, in fact, the last remaining authority of a state that had on that day ceased to exist. His wife said to Sophie, “You need not worry. I swear on the lives of my children that the duke has never met us personally.”

After pausing to take a guess at her sincerity, Sophie ordered the soldier to release Cornelis. “Whatever you do, don’t interrupt,” she said, and went on her way.

When the Drebbels entered Christian’s chamber, the first thing they noticed was an angry discussion being held in French. They were taken aside and told to wait there while matters of state were being attended to. Cornelis didn’t recognize the man arguing with the king of Denmark, holding with evident disgust a letter in his hands, but he thought that had to be Villiers.

“This is unacceptable,” he was saying. “This reads like a list of terms for surrender.”

The king shrugged. “Let me remind you that I’ve already seized control of your Parliament, so signing this will be but a formality.”

“You’re insulting the pride of Great Britain with these demands!”

“Great Britain is no more,” he said very slowly, as if to a child. “Scotland has betrayed you, and quite eagerly, I might add. No, I’m saving your pride. I’m letting you pretend that your consent was asked.”

The duke studied the document again. “This says you’re asserting your ancient rights to the throne of England.” He slapped the paper against the table. “You have no such rights!”

“Well, firstly, my warships disagree with you. And secondly, I base my claim on the right of conquest gained six hundred years ago by my ancestor Sweyn.”

That name gave Villiers pause. To the average person, Sweyn Forkbeard was no one, an obscure figure at best; but every lord of Villiers’s rank had read about the family of ambitious Danes who had once ruled England. Sweyn himself had only occupied the throne for around a month, but his son Canute the Great had reigned for two solid decades.

Cornelis didn’t know any of that history, but seeing how much it affected the duke made him gain a deeper appreciation of how far Christian was willing to go to conceal the fact that he was the true reason for the invasion.

“Parliament will not accept these arguments,” argued Villiers. “And neither will the people.”

Christian’s tone hardened as he took the letter from the table and shoved it into the duke’s hand. “Go and tell your people that the days of Canute are back.”

“I will not! True English patriots will rise up by the thousands to demand, and if necessary to fight for, the release of their rightful king.”

Christian drew out his sword and slashed the duke’s guts open. The room drew a collective breath of shock, followed by expectant silence. The duke collapsed onto the floor and, at a signal from the king, two soldiers hurried to take the body elsewhere. “Search his house,” he ordered. “Add his riches to the Iceland fund. And arrest whoever is supposed to be in charge of England now.”

Quickly, the soldiers in the room took up separate tasks: one of them started scrubbing the blood off the floor, another was handed the king’s sword for cleaning, and a small group went outside to fulfill the arrest order. Then Christian took notice of Cornelis and waved for him to approach the table.

“I see your wife was returned to you. Are you happy now?”

“She should never have been taken. You could simply have asked me to come.”

The king didn’t like that tone of defiance, and pointed at the spot where Villiers had fallen. “Saying ‘please’ is for people who don’t have a sword.”

Undeterred, Cornelis pressed on, “Where do you have my children?”

“They are perfectly safe, just like your wife. You’ll be free to see them later today.” Christian walked around the room until he found a seat. “Did you meet Munk?”

Cornelis didn’t want to answer and concede the change in the course of the conversation.

“What’s wrong with him?” the king asked Mrs. Drebbel.

“Please, Your Majesty, let me see them while you talk to Cornelis.”

The king regarded both of them with pity, and ordered for her to be escorted away. “Leave it to a mother to find the diplomatic middle ground.”

The thought that it was Sophie’s presence that kept Christian from acting more impulsively made Cornelis shudder. To push that idea from his head, he sought another topic. “I take it I stand before the king of England now.”

“I appreciate that you didn’t phrase it as a question,” replied Christian in an exceedingly gentle tone.

Cornelis had worked for kings long enough to know when such smoothness hid a blade. “In natural philosophy, one learns to recognize when a fact about the world is unquestionable.” He didn’t add his opinion that politics wasn’t made of facts, and said instead, “I regret that not many in London share the same practical inclination.”

“All the worse for them. More heads to display at the London Bridge, more money for the Iceland fund, more breathing room in Parliament. I hope I don’t have to slice my way through the entire English nobility before one of them acknowledges that I’m in charge here.”

Once more Cornelis saw the conversation take a grisly turn and felt the urge to steer the king’s attention away from that mood. “What’s the Iceland fund?” Against his hopes, Christian’s face hardened further.

“It’s an annoyance to no end, thanks to one of your fellow Dutchmen.”

“I’m afraid I don’t understand, Your Majesty.”

Christian chuckled. “Have you heard of one captain Sulayman?” Cornelis shook his head. “I thought you would know the story. He betrayed your country and swore allegiance to the Turks. To this day I’m still gathering the money to ransom all the people he took from Iceland. By God, the gall it takes for a pirate to venture that far north!”

Now Cornelis knew what that was about. The raid of Iceland had, over the less than six years since, entered the realm of scary stories told to keep children obedient.

Christian still seemed absorbed in the story. “Since this has to do with you, I can tell you a little secret: I would give Sulayman the crown I’ve won today, this warship, every sheep in England and my cape. That man will never know it, but he’s the reason why Denmark will rule the world.”

“What?”

The king’s voice lowered until only Cornelis could hear. “Didn’t Munk tell you why he made a detour?”

The question had never occurred to him. “Anyone can see why. He refused to give up and went to find the route in the other direction.”

“That’s not the reason. Here’s what happened: while he was coming back from America and Sulayman was on his way to Iceland, they crossed paths.”

“He didn’t mention that.”

“Because he doesn’t want to attribute his fame to chance. But that day is the key to everything we’re doing now. Munk’s lookout man spotted the English ship coming toward them. Munk took the spyglass and saw that it had been taken by pirates, and decided not to risk being captured too. So he turned northward. The rest is history: his ship crashed in Greenland, he met the natives, and he found the Arctic passage. All thanks to that greedy pirate.”

Cornelis stood in silence, imagining the chains of consequence that had to have moved at a precise speed to arrange such an encounter. He suddenly felt too small.

“Mr. Drebbel? Are you still listening?”

“Yes, Your Majesty. I was pondering the future of world trade.”

“You’re thinking of trade, but I’m thinking of bigger things. You’ll start work immediately on making more of those submersible ships, but I want you to study how to equip them with cannons.”

That last part pulled Cornelis back from his thoughts. “What do you need cannons for?”

“Is that a serious question?”

“A ship that stays hidden underwater has nothing to fear from pirates.”

“That’s true, Mr. Drebbel, but I want the other ships to be afraid of mine.”

Cornelis felt his throat dry up. “You don’t just want a merchant fleet. You want an army.”

“Now you get it. Picture in your mind’s eye what the future’s going to look like: every one of our enemies will hesitate to cross the seas because they know there’s something hidden in the water. Something that can hit them from below, something that can never be found. A secret weapon that my empire alone will have.”

Cornelis could hear the demands competing for his conscience. It had been years since he’d had such a big opportunity to feed his children, but he didn’t know how much of his soul it would cost. “Do you intend to become the sole master of the oceans?”

“I intend to become more than that. As long as no one else has these ships, or knows how to build them, I will be a legend. This is a propitious time for legends, Mr. Drebbel. The ancient Norsemen spoke of a creature that hid underwater, waiting to prey on unwary sailors. They called it Hafgufu. That’s what you’re going to build for Denmark: a monster that eats ships.”

All strength abandoned Cornelis, and he looked for a chair before his legs melted. “Exactly whom do you want to swallow?”

“Spain, for starters. England has been utterly inept at giving those Pope worshipers the smacking they deserve. Once I have your ships, Mexican silver will no longer sustain their vulgar heresy. Then there’s Portugal, of course, and France. In time, I may even retake the holy lands from the Turks.”

“I ask one thing, Your Majesty.”

The desperation in that plea made Christian stop enumerating his war plans. “You are aware that I’m capable of sustaining you for the rest of your life.”

“Still one thing I need of you. Just one.”

The sound of Christian’s breath sufficed to make Cornelis shake in terror. “You already agreed to work for me. You said you would’ve jumped at the chance.”

“Yes, I did say that, and there’s one thing I require. I cannot build one ship without your word.”

Christian hit the table with his fist. “You dare make demands of me?”

“Who needs whom here?” Cornelis surprised himself; he hadn’t meant to lay out so plainly the true nature of their relationship. It seemed to him that those words could be his last.

Sweat drops trembled on Christian’s forehead as he clenched his jaw. “Speak,” he growled.

“I want the Dutch Republic to be spared. Fight the Turks, fight the French, destroy the Holy Roman Empire for all I care, but my country’s vessels must not be harmed.”

Christian gave the request the briefest thought before erupting in laughter. “Of course, you fool! You don’t know what you’re saying. I wasn’t planning to move against Protestant countries anyway!”

That reaction confused Cornelis, but he wasn’t going to let that sway him. “Do I have your word?”

“I’ll sign a decree if that’ll do it. The Dutch Republic! What an idea! Get out of here. Go to your wife.”

A pair of soldiers took Cornelis out while Christian still shook with laughter. Cornelis had been more useful than he could’ve known: he’d given Denmark the perfect cover. The Spanish and the French would see their ships drop like flies while the Dutch sailed freely, so suspicion would focus on the Dutch, and no one would think to look at Denmark.

Evening, July 19 (Julian), 1651

Stockholm

Everyone in Sweden was shocked that their king dressed as a man. The sovereign had since childhood preferred the more energetic and physical pastimes, and by the time of assuming the throne, had become famous for speaking, walking and sitting like no well-bred woman ever did. But a woman she was, even holding the title of king because Sweden had no other, even having at the time of birth been briefly declared to be a boy. King Kristina of the House of Vasa did many things the manly way, but in one respect she distanced herself from male customs: she never drank. As a frequenter of writers and musicians and philosophers brought to her court from all over Europe, she valued above all things the importance of nourishing her mind and keeping it awake.

As soon as Countess Leonora Ulfeldt of the House of Oldenburg entered the reception hall of the Big Ball House of Stockholm, she found it easy to identify which of the dozens of figures conversing before the start of the play was the king of Sweden. While her height and size were unremarkable in that room, surrounded by tall Swedes, her disordered hair and practical clothes marked her as an exception in a sea of wigs and jewels. Leonora herself had a preference for the male form of dress, but seeing Kristina made her feel less alone. She admired the king’s audacity. It was a hot summer night, and elegance was suffocating.

She took one step toward the small group and hesitated. She disliked the sensation; as a daughter and sister of kings, she was no stranger to courtly manners. However, Kristina had a reputation for existing outside of protocol. Leonora had been warned that this king would see right through any conversational maneuver, and she thought she’d decided on an effective introduction to what she needed to say, but Kristina in the flesh, in the middle of animated discussion with erudite men whose intellect was very much her inferior, laughing without reserve, carrying herself with no care for decorum or poise, was an intimidating sight. It made Leonora long for a life that could be.

After some quick rethinking, Leonora decided that people who didn’t live by protocol were likely to respond well to direct words, and so she approached the king with a more relaxed demeanor. “Your Majesty,” she said, and half the heads in the room turned to her, “please forgive the interruption. I bring news from Denmark that must be heard privately.”

Kristina’s face showed no reaction. “I don’t think I know you,” she pointed out in impeccable Danish, with a grave voice that made Leonora tremble.

“My name is Leonora Ulfeldt,” she replied with a curtsey, “and… that is the reason I had to seek Your Majesty at a public place instead of requesting an audience.”

“Indeed,” nodded the king, amid the murmurations of those who had understood the exchange. Ulfeldt had recently become an infamous name. Leonora’s husband, the count Corfits Ulfeldt, was wanted in Denmark under accusations of treason. In her current disgraced state, she would never have been granted an audience through the ordinary channels. The message Leonora carried must be of the gravest importance for her to have incurred public exposure in that manner. “How are things in Canute’s dominions?” Leonora’s father, the late Christian the Fourth, had many times referred to his impromptu annexation of England as a restoration of the ancient empire of his ancestors. His successor, King Frederik the Third, had started referring to it with the blunter name of Canutic Empire.

Leonora wasted no words. “You could call them Margrete’s dominions, to hear my brother speak of them.”

Kristina caught the reference at once, and her face froze. “Watch the play with me. You’ll sit by my side and tell me all about your dear king.” She paid no further attention to the scholars she’d been talking to, and, taking Leonora by the hand, led her into the auditorium.

For the first several minutes, conversation was not possible in their box seats. The overture to Moorflower was famously loud, with explicit instructions from the composer to fill the air to the point that attention was impeded from veering elsewhere. The story of the pious refugees who by their inexperience had sailed directly into the hands of pirates had left the Venetian public unimpressed, mainly because the success of captain Sulayman was odious to a people who prided themselves on warding off every advance from the Turks, but in Protestant lands that tale of sincere devotion met with tragedy struck a dear chord.

The overture ended and the curtain opened. The tenor who played William Bradford started singing a hopeful aria about the promised land in America, tearing the heartstrings of those who knew the play’s ending.

Kristina asked softly, “Have you seen the original version?” Her voice had somehow grown even deeper, sending chills all through Leonora, who only managed to shake her head. “Some years ago, I invited an Italian troupe to come and perform Moorflower in Venetian. It’s better than in German, but this time I wanted to test what it sounded like in Swedish. I’ve had the idea for a while now that Sweden should open itself more to what is going on in the arts, and the first step is to make Swedish into a literary language.”

Leonora strained to catch the singer’s lines underneath Kristina’s explanation. “Does Your Majesty like the result?”

“It’s only the first act; we shall see. But they had better put on a good show; my treasurer yelled at me when he saw how much I paid for the translation,” she confided with a wicked smile. Leonora took the chance to have a close look at her clothes, which had nothing luxurious about them. She found truth in the gossip about Kristina: she liked to wear none of her jewels, and would happily part with them for a good book.

The aria concluded with a prayer that had given critics fodder for plenty of commentaries; its wording rang true to Protestant ears, who couldn’t believe that an Italian Catholic had written it. Although the Inquisition didn’t extend to Venice, speculation about Samuele Fulla’s religion didn’t cease. His unexplained disappearance only served to keep the rumors growing.

They were alone in the box, but Kristina waited until the public seemed sufficiently enraptured before she leaned to her side and whispered in Latin, “Now what is this nonsense about Margrete?”

Leonora had alluded to Queen Margrete, who three centuries earlier had ruled all the Scandinavian nations from a single throne. That was the magnitude of the news she was bringing. She waited until the music grew louder again and replied in Latin, “Frederik knows of Your Majesty’s change of heart.”

A shift in Kristina’s posture told her all she needed. She expected the king to say something, but the topic was delicate: Sweden was the most valuable ally of the Canutic Empire in the ongoing war against the Holy Roman Empire. Sweden was supposed to be fighting on the side of Protestantism, but suspicions had started to circulate about Kristina’s crypto-Catholic tendencies. The mere mention of Margrete sufficed to hint at what Frederik was willing to do to stop Kristina’s conversion.

Seeing that the king was still lost in thought, Leonora pressed on, “Your Majesty is being watched closely. It has been that way for a long time. What has been said about my husband does not entirely match the truth.”

Kristina turned her head to look directly at Leonora. “As much as I like diplomacy, I have no patience for games and innuendo. What is it that you know?”

Leonora felt too exposed speaking in a theater, but the music gave her sufficient cover. “More things are happening than Your Majesty knows. Denmark has changed. I’ve become aware of plans to shape the entire landscape of Europe. It was my father, for instance, who sabotaged Your Majesty’s attempt at peace.”

“Be direct,” insisted the king.

With a trembling voice, Leonora spoke a forbidden name. “Johan Salvius.”

“What about him?” Kristina looked straight ahead, refusing to reveal any feeling, but Leonora was not deceived. Sweden’s envoy at the talks at Osnabrück had been Europe’s last hope to put an end to the wars of religion, but he never had the chance to fulfill his assignment; his ship had sunk before reaching the German coast.

Leonora leaned closer. “I was present at the war room when my father gave the order to destroy his ship.”

Kristina’s hands curled into fists. “What?”

“I can’t disclose everything I know. I’m still a patriot, despite what people like to make up about me. But I can say this much: Denmark is able to sink any ship at sea.”

“I’ve heard the legend. The Hafgufu has been summoned. Is it true?”

“After a fashion. My father used it against your envoy to keep the war going.”

“Danish soldiers have fought side by side with mine. Why would Christian ruin the peace talks?”

“His goals were different from Your Majesty’s. After he got his hands on the Hafgufu, his outlook on the war changed. A compromise under which Catholics could keep their kingdoms unopposed was the last thing he wanted. He would rather keep throwing soldiers’ lives at the rest of Europe if that meant denying the Holy Emperor one day of rest.”

“How long has this been happening?”

“It began much before the peace talks. We were both children when my father conquered Normandy.”

Kristina nodded. The annexation of Normandy in 1631 had been a powerful gesture, an explicit reclamation of ancient Viking territory. “Did he use the Hafgufu in that campaign?

“Yes, but the sole reason was to distract Richelieu from the alliance he was trying to make with Your Majesty.”

“Your father’s spies heard of it?”

“He said he’d never allow a Catholic to be our ally, even against the Holy Emperor.”

Kristina put her hands on her face. “Religious war is going to be our ruin.” Then she saw more clearly her own situation. “Does your brother feel that way about me?”

“Yes.” Leonora was afraid of saying more, and remained silent until the first act ended and the public started clapping. “Your Majesty’s objections to the Lutheran faith have been known for many years. In particular, the Danish navy has been paying attention to the scholars Your Majesty has been inviting to teach at court.”

“They have been targeting scholars?”

At the increased alarm in Kristina’s voice, Leonora remembered, This is a learned woman. Of course she cares more strongly about that. “It has been a policy of the Canutic Empire to keep Catholic preachers from setting foot in Sweden. Your Majesty is perceived as… sympathetic to their influence. So, from time to time, a ship sinks here, another there, and they all just happen to be carrying a missionary, or a confessor, or a Papal messenger. It’s never accidental.”

Realization put light in Kristina’s eyes. “And nobody pays attention because ships have been sinking everywhere.”

“That’s all Denmark’s doing. We’ve been hitting Spanish routes for decades. Honestly, if they’ve been able to afford to keep fighting us, it’s because we still can’t track every single galleon bringing them silver from Mexico.”

Kristina smiled. “It may surprise you to hear I’ve heard some scholars claim too much silver can hurt a kingdom.”

The tangent took Leonora by surprise. “I can’t see why.”

“Many don’t. But the explanation can wait. Is this all you’ve come to tell me?”

“I’m afraid not. To say the rest, I need a formal audience.”

“Can’t you speak while the play lasts?”

“I’ve brought someone who has news of other lands. Worse news.”

This time it was Kristina who felt the need to whisper. “Worse than Denmark taking over Sweden?”

“There’s so much more to take over.”

“As I said, can’t you tell me about it now?”

“As I said, more things are happening than Your Majesty knows. The information my guest has discovered is even more dangerous than anything I’ve said tonight.”

“Who needs so badly to talk to me?”

“The colonial governor of Nova Dania. The daughter of Jens Munk.”

Dawn, July 20 (Julian), 1651

Stockholm archipelago

As she paddled her way between the thousands of little islands that lay between Stockholm and the sea, Leonora was thinking of the enclosed space where she’d spent the past weeks and where Kathrine Munk was still waiting for the signal that it was safe to go out. Kathrine had been living inside a stolen submarine since the start of the year, traveling undetected to all corners of the world while her siblings ran the Munkhaven settlement at Hudson Bay, the same place that had almost killed her father three decades before. She’d needed their help with that arrangement while she gathered the evidence to unmask the scale of Denmark’s operations and the risk they posed for all nations. With Catholic Europe firmly in the grip of superstition, Kristina was the only ruler clear-headed enough to understand their report of what was happening and powerful enough to do something about it.

Leonora’s rowboat reached their rendezvous point between three unpopulated islets of the unimaginably vast and intricate archipelago where Stockholm was all but hidden. She extended a hand to tap six times at a metallic object sculpted and painted to look like the bloated corpse of a seagull. It not only showed the submarine’s position, but also kept its occupants alive. At full capacity, a submarine of the Danish Secret Navy was able to maintain thirty rowers for two months before needing to resurface for clean water; human waste could be released directly into the sea via two airtight doors, whose design had required rapid advancement in the techniques of sealing wooden surfaces with tar. Procuring food was as easy as fishing; air, however, was still an unsolved problem. By heating saltpeter, as taught by the alchemist Sendivogius, Drebbel had found a way to replenish a few hours of life-giving air for a small vessel, but ships of the size that Christian wanted to use in war would have needed such large amounts of saltpeter that the furnaces would have ended up consuming the very substance they were trying to obtain. Instead, a system had been devised whereby an extendable pipe was raised to the surface and allowed to stay open for a few minutes. Its end was always shaped deceptively: a piece of wood, a clump of seaweed, a shoe. Since the creation of this new navy, Christian had intuited that the greatest portion of its success would depend on keeping its existence unknown. The same careful approach under Frederik’s rule was proving lethal for Spanish sailors. But one problem of having a fleet of undetectable ships was that, when the empire lost track of one, it was never certain whether it was due to a faulty airlock, a fire, a bout of scurvy, a broken breathing pipe, a lucky cannon ball from a Spanish galleon, or a determined thief.

And Kathrine Munk was nothing if not determined.

Leonora tapped against the metal of the pipe six times, meaning that the crew should make the vessel emerge. Five meant they should hold their position, and four meant there were enemies nearby. The ship had already used up its ammunition when they had taken it, but by staying deep enough it was able to evade attack, even from other submarines, because Danish military engineers hadn’t yet found a way to make gunpowder ignite underwater. After signaling her presence, Leonora took her boat a prudent distance away. The end of the breathing pipe had been closed and retracted. At that moment Kathrine would be ordering her rowers to operate the multiple pumps whose function was to remove water from a series of tanks in the ship and thus render it buoyant. After less than a minute, the shape of the D.H.M. Tarasque, officially lost in an accident during an assault on a Portuguese expedition tasked with charting the Indian Ocean, emerged in all its grandeur. Fruit of Christian’s obsession and Drebbel’s genius, a vessel of Hafgufuprojektet was a brute presence that refused to be dismissed, an incontestable fact that by its mere size and simplicity of shape displaced all other impressions from the observer’s mind as effortlessly as it did water. Leonora hoped it would never cease to have the same effect on her.

An airlock on top of the Tarasque opened and Kathrine climbed out. Leonora paddled closer to the massive structure of wood and bronze and tar, with a thick hemisphere of transparent glass on front, and helped her jump onto the boat.

“Did anything happen overnight?” asked the countess.

“Two more rowers have caught scurvy.” Kathrine raised her eyes to the open sky and felt a flood of relief as she took in the morning air. “I’m starting to feel weakened myself. We all need some shore leave.” Her knuckles tapped a signal on the hull of the Tarasque and it began the laborious procedure to submerge again.

“Not here,” said Leonora. “The last thing we need is for a crew of Danish deserters to be seen taking shelter in Sweden.”

Kathrine entertained the scenario and found that she liked it. “If you want to put it in those terms, losing our alliance with Sweden would hasten the end of the war.”

“By letting the wrong side win,” said Leonora. “I may be betraying my brother, but I won’t betray Denmark.”

“I thought we were doing this because we had become the wrong side.”

“Let’s not rehash that discussion.” Leonora cursed the brightness of the risen sun and started steering the boat back toward Stockholm. “I agree that your information—” She couldn’t finish the sentence. Her expression became fixed with terror.

Kathrine turned her head to the spot Leonora was looking at, and recognized the unmistakable pattern of waves generated by a submarine cannon being prepared to surface. “We were followed!” She tried to stand up to get a better look. The other ship had positioned itself out of sight of the Tarasque’s lookout glass. “We need to warn the crew.” Her efforts to stay on her feet were rocking the boat.

Leonora grabbed her hand to force her to sit. “No, we need to flee, fast.”

Kathrine wiggled out of her grasp, and the boat responded to her forceful move by throwing them both into the water.

Leonora started to sink and hurried to rip off the gigantic skirt of her dress. Kathrine, who was wearing a soldier uniform, braced toward the quickly descending mass of the Tarasque, desperate to reach it in time to slam her palm against the hull, but the sound of a cannon shot crushed her efforts. The ball ripped a hole in the Tarasque, just above the waterline. The ringing in her ears drowned the cries of alarm she knew must be there. She was so stunned that she didn’t resist when her companion took her under her arm and dragged her away.

“Take air and dive,” urged Leonora.

Kathrine obeyed, too shocked to object. Once she was fully underwater, her survival impulse kicked in and her blood ran with alertness. She knew they had to take advantage of the shallower passages between islets, where the submarine wouldn’t be able to follow them. Above all, they must not let their pursuer know they were headed for the royal palace.

A full minute passed and she swam up to breathe, and quickly dove again because the gunner had been waiting for her reappearance to fire another shot. It passed well above their heads and got lost in the winding channels, which meant they were still very short of a safe distance.

They kept on swimming, taking as few breaths as possible, straining their limbs to move faster and their ears to be mindful of the provenance of the shots. They took so many turns and detours that they started fearing they’d lost their way among the maze of islands that protected Stockholm, and when they felt their legs brush against the sea bottom they realized they’d reached an area where the ship could not follow.

Kathrine walked up the shore and let herself collapse in tears. She felt guilty for not hearing the last gasps of her crew, and felt silly for feeling guilty. Leonora crawled beside her and glanced at the sun’s position before hugging Kathrine. “They took an oath. They died for the good of the nation. Now we have to honor their bravery. The king is waiting for us.”

“The king, the king, the king! I’m fed up with all of them. Kings have decided over the lives of common people for all of history. When will something of importance be permitted to happen without those leeches having their hands in it?”

Leonora said nothing; with the family she had, any word of comfort would have sounded insincere. She hadn’t known the crewmen of the Tarasque personally, but they had traveled with Kathrine through blockades and near-misses in the search for clues to Frederik’s misdeeds. It was easy to guess that the attack on them had been ordered by him. She gave Kathrine a moment to herself, until she was able to stand up and refocus on their mission.

Following Leonora’s lead, Kathrine started walking in the direction of the city. If things went their way from that point on, she’d have abundant time to mourn properly, in peace.

Morning, July 20 (Julian), 1651

Stockholm

The guards standing watch at the main gate of the Palace of the Three Crowns refused at first to believe that the two disheveled, muddied visitors asking to be let in could have any business to discuss with the king of Sweden. It was only when Kathrine pointed out that there was a warship nearby and that everyone in the city must have heard the distant echoes of multiple cannon shots that word was sent inside the palace, questions were asked of successively higher-ranked officers, and the order finally came to grant entrance to both women.

They were escorted into a gallery where one of the most luxurious art collections in Europe was slowly being built. King Kristina entered the room shortly after her guests, and even under the abundant illumination of the summer day, she took only the briefest notice of their disordered appearance. “It seems you had difficulties.”

“We were attacked,” said Leonora. “A Danish ship has just sunk ours.”

“Here, in the city?”

Both guests nodded, and Kristina moved toward one of her guards, but Kathrine said, “It’s no use searching for it. Your Majesty’s men will never find the kind of ship that Denmark has.”

“You have a very high opinion of Denmark’s—” Kristina’s eyes narrowed, and she turned to Leonora. “Is the Hafgufu here?”

“Yes.” She hadn’t come with the intention to reveal so much, but their situation had changed too fast for caution. “Let me introduce Kathrine Munk, governor of Nova Dania. She barely made it here alive. She’s risked everything to research what she has come to tell you.”

“Well, you have me here,” said the king. “I’m listening.”

Kathrine looked around the gallery, looking for a tool she could use to demonstrate her message. Curiosities large and small were showcased in no obvious order; her eyes passed over a porcelain teapot, an unreadable papyrus, a jade mask, a marble nymph, a set of black chess pieces, several full armors and an impressively-sized bookcase, until they rested on a globe model of the world. She approached it and motioned for Kristina to join her. “Is this object precious?” she asked, showing her dirty hands.

“Information is worth more,” replied the king.

That made Kathrine feel more at ease, and she rotated the globe until Asia was exposed. “The Canutic Empire has been building strongholds all over the northern coast of Asia,” she began, running her finger over the area.

“That’s to be expected. Denmark uses the Arctic to trade with China.”

“I didn’t say trading posts; I said strongholds. Starting with Mangazeya, Danish rule has been spreading over the northern coast in such a way that it can by now be said this entire region has been added to the Danish crown.”

Kristina looked at the world, making a conscious update of her model of it. “You’re saying that all these places have become… provinces of the Canutic Empire?”

Kathrine nodded, and her hand made a sweeping motion over north Asia. “There are very few natural defenses here. Barely a mountain for thousands of miles. I’ve intercepted reports that describe war plans against the tribal chiefs of the steppes. Frederik wants to rule everything north of China.”

“Does he plan to attack China?”

“That is unlikely. No one has survived land warfare against the Great Ming since the new emperor took charge.”

It didn’t take much intuition to interpret Kristina’s face at that moment. What had started, not without a touch of presumptuousness, to be called the “loss of China” was a topic that caused sadness and anger throughout Christendom, but because it had been the Jesuits who had “lost” China, those feelings were more intense among Catholics. “I see,” she said at last. “So Frederik is staying close to the north coast. Is there any economic reason to want those lands?”

“We’re not sure yet. One never knows where a valuable mine will appear. What we do know is that roughly half of that territory is forest.”

“Inhabited?”

“Very sparsely.”

“What does he want with it?”

“The first reason, and the simplest, is that he’s building a navy. Ships need wood. With that much forest, Denmark could sustain a world-spanning fleet.”

“Let him try,” said the king. The look on Kathrine’s face made her chuckle, and she explained, “Even if what you say is true, Frederik won’t be the first ruler who dreams of taking more than he can control. Ambition of such size always ends in tragedy. Long ago, it happened to Alexander; it will happen to him.”

Leonora intervened. “I’m sorry, but Your Majesty is not seeing the full picture.”

“Is that so? Please enlighten me.”

She took the globe from Kathrine’s hands and tilted it so that all of the Arctic was visible. “Greenland and Iceland are all but Danish colonies. On paper, Scotland is an allied power, but it’s completely dependent on Danish support. And there’s the North American colony, centered on Munkhaven, but the plan is to expand Nova Dania to cover every possible piece of frozen land where the fabled Vinland could have existed. Does Your Majesty see the problem now? Once he’s secured control over both coasts, plus Greenland, the entire Arctic will become an inner sea of the Canutic Empire.”

Leonora was trembling at her own words, but Kristina was still unimpressed. “I fail to see the strategic usefulness of conquering all that ice. You can’t grow crops on ice; you can’t build roads on it; you can’t feed it to cattle. Either your information is mistaken or Frederik is an incapable planner.”

Kathrine pointed at the windows through which the heat of summer inundated the gallery. “Doesn’t Your Majesty think this summer is quite warm?”

The king shrugged. “Yes, summer is warm. Your point?”

“It shouldn’t be this warm, not here in the Nordic countries.”

Kristina considered the idea and said, “Prove it. If you have one of Drebbel’s tubes, show me comparisons from one year to the next.”

Leonora’s heart almost stopped at the mention of Drebbel, but she saw what the king meant. Among Cornelis Drebbel’s many inventions, one of the most famous was a type of thermometer that functioned with tinted water. “We haven’t measured the heat, and maybe we should have. But we have seen the changes that are causing summers to get worse.”

That assertion made Kristina laugh. “So, not only is Frederik attempting to rule the oceans, but he’s also gained mastery of the sun?”

Kathrine was losing her patience. “Your Majesty is known for being perfectly informed about everything that happens in Europe. How many times has Holland been flooded this year?”

“What a question! It would be easier to count how many days it hasn’t been flooded.”

“That’s right. The Dutch have many virtues, and my favorite is how organized they are. Their historical records show clearly, year by year, that floods used to happen less often. Something very bad is happening to the sea.”

“And you want to convince me that this is somehow Frederik’s fault, too.” Kristina paused to organize her thoughts, and said, “You wouldn’t have come to see me if Frederik were indulging in a harmless whim. You have found something bigger than a cartographic novelty. What is this about? What does he want with all that ice?”

Leonora blurted, “Think no ice.”

All Kristina could say to that was a “Huh?” that prompted Kathrine to close her eyes and gather her strength before completing her act of treason.

“As may be obvious from my name, I’m the daughter of Jens Munk. I’ll tell Your Majesty a thing about my father: he hated the cold. I don’t blame him; three times in a row he was detained by winter in the middle of nowhere. When he returned home, he became immensely rich, and our family regained its titles, but he was a shadow of a human being. He’d lost all his teeth; his limbs had been chewed and spat out by frostbite. Until his dying day he professed a dream more ambitious than opening the Arctic: he wished to see the day when the polar region could be traversed freely, when no one would have to endure the hardships of winter ever again.”

“And my father, the king, adopted his vision,” added Leonora. “That’s why Denmark has been taking over frozen lands no one else cares to claim. It’s executing a large-scale operation to unfreeze them. That’s where the north Asian forests come into the picture: they are serving a double purpose. Those strongholds we mentioned along the coast are being kept warm by gigantic bonfires that burn day and night. Thousands of them, fed by a seemingly endless supply of wood, burning continuously for the past twenty-five years.”

The image of a perpetual line of fire at the northern extreme of the world filled Kristina’s imagination with stunned awe. “Is Frederik hoping to make the north more livable?”

Kathrine swept her hand over the globe. “He intends to melt it. Once the floating ice has vanished, the route to China will be navigable by normal ships.”

“The north of Asia,” added Leonora, “may be unusable for now. But under the endless snow, there’s endless land. If my brother succeeds in exposing it, he’ll become one of the world’s richest landowners.”

Kristina asked Kathrine, “Is Nova Dania on fire too?”

“I haven’t allowed it so far. But Frederik is growing impatient. And that leads us to the actual reason we’ve come to see Your Majesty. We wish to ask for the help of Sweden in our quest for independence.”

The word fell like a hammer in the room. None of them dared say anything more until they felt they could almost pretend it hadn’t happened.

“Is it at all possible?” Leonora asked finally, deliberately ambiguous as to whether she referred to the feasibility of Novadanian independence or of Swedish assistance.

The king breathed loudly, organizing her thoughts, before saying, “You have made it clear that Canutic military capabilities surpass mine, and probably everyone’s. Frederik already has his eyes on me, ready for any suspicious gesture on my part. I have all my soldiers deployed in the war against the Holy Emperor; and just today, you say a Danish warship was able to fire its cannons near my castle without being spotted by my navy. Do you realize what I’d be risking if I as much as tried to make a move against Denmark?”

Leonora couldn’t resist replying with another question. “Why is Sweden still fighting for a faith Your Majesty has abandoned?”

The king didn’t mind her bluntness. “Because my people remain Lutherans, and in these senseless times, that suffices to make them targets. I know better than anyone how ruinous war is, and I’d be happy to end it as soon as the Holy Emperor stops sending his armies my way.”

Leonora refrained from making the comment, which would have been rather unhelpful, that during her tour of German lands in search of allies to protect her husband she had heard the view that the Holy Emperor considered Sweden to be the aggressor, and thus the war only proceeded by the kneejerk mistrust between two sides neither of which wanted to keep fighting.

Kathrine hastened to redirect the conversation back to their request. “We’re not asking for any overt intervention. The idea of independence has been discussed for years in the Spanish colonies. With Denmark sabotaging as many Spanish ships as it can, the viceroyalties are dismally mismanaged. It wouldn’t appear as that big of a stretch if a similar movement arose farther north.”

The king stepped away from her visitors, walking backwards until both of them were contained within her visual field. She regarded them with admiration and fear, and prayed for the arrival of a time when the fate of nations wouldn’t hinge on secret conversations between so few people. Her conscience longed to be released from the weight of the crown, and she knew, because she cared enough to listen, that no one but the nobles, and not even every noble, was happy under monarchy; and the example of the Dutch Republic in leaving the Spanish Empire was being hailed in hushed tones by the brightest minds of Europe, who resented having to bow before kings to earn their sustenance. Doing away with monarchy: there was a worthy cause. As soon as the king of Sweden admitted it to herself, she felt at peace with what she had to do. “You make a good point that Frederik owns too much territory. I’ll help you get rid of him. What do you need?”

The globe rolled again and Kathrine stopped it by placing a finger on the east coast of North America. “We want to use the port of New Stockholm as a smuggling hub.”

The king approached to look more closely at the map, and frowned. The colony of New Sweden was but one of the numerous opportunistic endeavors that had spawned to fill the vacuum left by the extinction of the Kingdom of Great Britain and its colonization projects. It lay far enough from Nova Dania, but next door to New Netherland. “A smuggling hub for what?”

Kathrine started counting on her fingers. “Pamphlets, printing presses, wanted fugitives—” she opened her hands. “Everything, actually. New Amsterdam would be a closer, more practical location, but it’s too risky. The alliance between Denmark and the Dutch Republic is the strongest among Protestant nations. New Stockholm would allow for more secrecy.” She knew explanations would be easier if she could tell Kristina about the submarines, but she wanted to be able to claim some measure of patriotic loyalty. Even without mentioning the Danish Secret Navy, the reasons for the way she and Leonora had devised their plan were straightforward: king Frederik’s soldiers kept the strictest vigilance on anyone who disembarked at the port of Munkhaven, but the southern borders of Nova Dania extended into unmapped regions that only the Natives crossed with confidence. Frederik had abandoned his aspiration to expand the colony to the south after the spread of a new custom, started by the Ojibwe and imitated in the other trading tribes: the Natives had stopped hunting beavers and switched to breeding them on purpose. The result was such a proliferation of dams that the Great Lakes river basin and its outlet to the sea were impossible to invade with submarines. So the Danish were forced to stay in the north, the Natives lived unmolested around the lakes, and anyone coming by land could move at will.

“Is that all? Free passage?” asked the king. “I was expecting you’d request military assistance.”

“We’ll take care of that part,” said Kathrine. “In every war, the move you don’t see coming is the one that kills you.” She wouldn’t say more, but she’d discussed the matter extensively with Leonora. In all the years that Denmark had been using submarines to sneak upon enemy ships, the one scenario that had never been considered was to have its own submarines used against them. Danish soldiers had devised no tactics and received no training to handle an attack from another submarine. It had always been assumed that other countries would lack such a weapon. That was the hidden disadvantage on which Nova Dania would rely in its rebellion against the Canutic Empire.

“I see you’ve thought about this thoroughly,” said Kristina with satisfaction. “I like people who take their time to think.”

Leonora asked excitedly, “Then Your Majesty is on our side?”

The king nodded. “New Stockholm is open to you. As sure as I live, Nova Dania will be independent.”

Midnight sun, December 22 (Julian), 1658

Terra incognita

Whenever a land is invaded, different families adopt different strategies to keep their children from harm. When the Danish took England, this common pattern reoccurred. Some left the country. Others schemed with the hope of one day expelling the Danes. Others saw a way to survive and even benefit if they played along with the invaders.

Admiral Edward Montagu belonged to a select generation of Britons born just before the foundation of the Canutic Empire. Men like him and his peers had reached adulthood with no memories of an independent England. For the families that didn’t flee to the Virginia colony, life under Danish rule had simply become the world they knew.

But in 1658, Nova Dania achieved its independence by using the same technology that had given Denmark command of the oceans. Kathrine’s assessment had been right: the rise of two opposed powers armed with submarines was the one geopolitical occurrence that the Canutic Empire had never considered. The wars of religion, which had briefly seemed about to end with a crushing Protestant victory, tapered out instead, with neither side winning or acknowledging defeat, and with Denmark’s ability to influence European affairs gravely diminished. During the process, the independentist cause also permeated through the people of New Sweden, who declared their own independence in 1654. Again, Kathrine had calculated accurately. To the outrage of her court, king Kristina didn’t mind that a remote colony would choose to govern itself. Shortly afterward she abdicated and spent her old age traveling across Catholic lands. She counted it as one more independence from the Swedish crown.

During Denmark’s last attempt to regain Munkhaven from the rebels, Admiral Montagu and his crew abandoned the battle in their submarine, the D.H.M. Jasconius, seeing the futility of their mission. With both Canutic and Novadanian fleets patrolling the seas, and the heightened hostility they could expect at any Catholic destination, there was no known place in Christendom where they could hide. Believing they might find shelter in the territory of a friendly nation, they took the Jasconius to a Swedish settlement in West Africa, called the Gold Coast, in the hopes that they’d be able to rest and hide for some months while the war effort took their superiors’ minds off of their desertions. But what they found was that the Swedish government had taken the side of the Novadanians, and their Danish uniforms made their presence unwanted. They gave some thought to crossing the Atlantic and trying their luck in the colony that the Dutch had just founded on the coast of Brazil, but they decided against it, since they couldn’t be sure that the Dutch authorities wouldn’t have been alerted to their disappearance. So, for a few months, they resorted to pillaging goods from Portuguese vessels headed for the Angolan slave markets, until a storm in September forced all non-submarine ships to stay away from the coast. A submarine could wait out the storm in the calmer waters below, but not for too long before having to resurface for air. The first location where they reemerged, near the middle of the South Atlantic, was swarmed with Portuguese, Spanish and even French ships, all waiting for the right time to resume their course toward their respective colonies; the submerged shape in their midst aroused some remarks among the most observant of the tripulants, but as the Danish decided not to attempt an attack against such a numerous enemy, it didn’t merit any more attention.

After renewing their air, the deserters fled to the south, hoping to put distance between them and any potential enemy. One day, they looted a lone Spanish ship on its way home from the Philippines. After sinking it, as was always done to remove any witnesses of submarine technology, they realized that the Jasconius had run out of cannon balls. That moment forced them to face reality. None of them had intended to become pirates, but they unquestionably were, and before they could come to terms with that new state of affairs, they found themselves unable of sustaining even that way of life. They were stranded, unwelcome, and defenseless.

They wandered in that manner for weeks, drawing closer and closer to a family of floating ice masses, avoiding them by passing underneath them as they’d been trained to do in the waters of the north. They encountered some funny flightless birds that they promptly hunted and cooked. After some more days, it became apparent that they had found land, albeit one covered with ice as far as the horizon. They worried about meeting white bears but saw none.

Admiral Montagu ordered his crew to explore the area; nothing was available but rocks, ice, and more of those loud, fatty birds. The soldiers wouldn’t starve as long as those birds remained so easy to kill, but a settlement couldn’t be built if there was no wood. Discussion was brief, and Montagu formulated a plan.

They would go home.

The discovery of new land, unknown and inaccessible to all other nations, was the answer to every dream of the Danish king. Although they had no way of knowing it, what they had reached was an entire continent. The addition of such a possession would more than suffice to gain them their pardon for abandoning their duty.

In the years to come, more submarines would arrive, loaded with wood, ready to replicate in the south the ambitious project underway in the north. They would probably need to wrestle the tip of South America from Spain to gain access to its forests, but they knew the Spanish navy stood no chance.

They were going to claim the polar continent for their king.

And to make whatever riches it contained usable, they were going to burn every single tree within their reach until the ice was gone and the sky was dark if that was what it took.

Part 4: Turn

The reason why God knows which possible futures will happen is not that He chooses to push our choices in a certain direction, but that He chooses to place us in a certain set of circumstances.

Luis de Molina, Concord Between Human Freedom and Divine Foreknowledge

Now we need to proceed with fantastic imagination and invent how one world could have contact with another.

Giordano Bruno, On the Infinite Universe and Worlds

Night, September 21 (Gregorian), 1620

Shuri

This is the moment when the currents of consequence meet. This is the day on which multiple threads of fate are twined into one.

Because Drake was knighted and the plank collapsed and our William didn’t live, he didn’t bring to Japan the shipbuilding methods that allowed the Western nations to cross big oceans. A vessel suitable for long distances has not yet been invented in Japan and is therefore not available to take ambassador Hasekura Tsunenaga back home from his last stop at Manila.

As the Mayflower is being captured, as Munk the Dane nears the peak of his sailing exploits, as René marches eastward with the Holy Emperor’s armies, the ill-suited trading ship Japan has sent to retrieve its ambassador can’t maneuver against the winds before hitting a semisubmerged rock and leaving its passengers stranded at the southernmost point under Japanese jurisdiction, the recently annexed archipelago of the Ryūkyūs.

The locals swarmed at the shore and launched boats to help rescue as many tripulants as they could. Tsunenaga was holding on to a floating piece of mast, his retinue nowhere to be seen. Rescuers carrying lanterns pulled up the survivors one by one into the boats. He was on the brink of fainting from exhaustion when they grabbed his arms and dragged him aboard. He cast a desperate look at the remains of the ship, following its unstoppable downward course until it was no longer visible in the depths, and the sea, illuminated by the boats’ lamps, showed him only his own terrified face.

He heard his rescuers shout instructions in their tongue and hours passed before someone spoke in Japanese. They took him to the warmth of a hearth. His luggage, of course, was hopelessly gone, but they gave him food and let him sleep.

Upon waking, he made his first mistake.

He said he needed to board a ship for Sendai. When they asked him why he was in such a hurry and who he was, he hoped they’d agree with him that his mission was crucial to Japan’s future, so he yielded a summary of his years of diplomacy abroad and his present mission. The Ryūkyūans, by that precious gift of contingency that sometimes told a people that they stood at a quickly moving crossroads in the flow of time, knew that this man was necessary to them, and by rapid word of mouth he was first described, then recommended and finally brought before the king of the islands.

Shō Nei was that type of tired man whose entire old age proceeded in reference to a single moment in the past that had thenceforth shackled him to a regret so heavy that it stopped the days from happening and left him solely capable of the basic action of continuing to exist. When Tsunenaga was ordered to sit in front of him, he stared at his guest with no apparent interest, and it seemed for a moment as if no conversation would occur.

“I hear you have seen Europe,” the king said after that long, uncertain pause. His Japanese was accented, but proper, and while Tsunenaga tried to compose his answer in his head, he also struggled to ascertain the precise level of politeness that he was required to use with an older man who ruled a tiny region that was, legally speaking, subordinate to the government he represented. The overlapping layers of the Japanese language could be a hindrance at such times. In the end he opted for maximum deference, because he knew that this bitter, joyless man had no reason to hold any sympathy for Japan, and he was going to have to get through him if he wanted to return home and deliver his report.

“Your Majesty is right. I have seen the imperial capitals in Spain and Italy. I also traveled twice across Mexico and both of its oceans.”

“How? Japan has no ships capable of such distances.”

“I bought passage on Portuguese ships for my mission.”

The king gave the barest nod. “Why did you go so far?”

“It is the wish of the Shōgun to settle terms of trade with Spain. Following his orders, Lord Masamune of Sendai sent me to speak with their king, whose name is Felipe.”

The king took a mental note of the expert way Tsunenaga had pronounced the name. It could mean that he’d had to learn Spanish to better perform his duties, but the king left that unremarked. “Did you succeed?”

“Unfortunately, my task was fruitless, Your Majesty.”

“Why?”

Tsunenaga was starting to feel a rising apprehension about where Shō Nei was going with his inquiry. His was a weak kingdom, which had been crushingly subdued by the Shōgun. Tsunenaga couldn’t imagine how his information could be of use to a former enemy who by now was all but finished, but as long as he was in his present state of absolute need for that man’s assistance, he saw no other option but to cooperate. “The king of Spain has been sending us priests of the Roman religion. He is not pleased with the fact that most Japanese are not following his wish that they convert.” The rest of the truth was that the Japanese government had begun to mistreat the missionaries in grievous ways, which Spanish spies had faithfully relayed to Madrid. But Tsunenaga would never speak ill of his government, even to someone on whose goodwill his fate hinged. There was, however, one key piece of information he had inadvertently let slip, due to a quirk of Japanese that served to mark the speaker’s allegiance to a group. When referring to those in Japan who had refused to convert, he had employed the verbal form corresponding to an out-group, which meant he didn’t count himself among them.

“You failed your lord. Why are you so eager to meet him? In your place, I would have stayed half a world away from his hand.”

“I have duties as a samurai. I have to recount what I saw and heard during my travels.”

“What you have to say must be more valuable than your titles and lands.”

“It is so, Your Majesty.” Tsunenaga’s insides coiled into a knot as he glimpsed the dangerous question he was in all likelihood going to be forced to answer.

“What news are you bringing to your lord?”

His mouth opened by its own will, rushing to disguise how laboriously he was trying to craft a version of the truth. “Your Majesty would grow weary of an enumeration of cities, officers, castles and ships.”

Ignoring the decoy, Shō Nei pursued. “Such vastness. This king Felipe must be immensely rich.”

“Very much so, Your Majesty.”

“Why does he send priests instead of merchants?”

“He does send merchants, but he cares more for his priests.”

The king grunted. “No one becomes very rich by neglecting trade. Are you sure you learned anything of value in Spain?”

He hurried to save his reputation, “I fulfilled my mission. I obtained an audience with king Felipe, and the message I carry are the words from his very mouth, with his reasons for rejecting our proposal,” and thus did he make his second mistake.

“Oh? Do tell.”

Saying no more would have been a mistake too, but his situation let him see no farther than his own life or death. Trembling at both the gravity of what he was revealing and the overpowering will that demanded to hear it, he gave his report. “The king of Spain demands that his priests be given full freedom to preach before he agrees to discuss any terms of trade. That includes giving up all the temples that the priests of Rome took from the priests of Shintō, and that the Shōgun ordered to seize back.”

“Those demands have no hope of being accepted. You’re foolishly going to the trouble of crossing the sea to bother your lord with empty words.”

Tsunenaga shook his head. “The king of Spain owns half the world. You know he rules over Manila, but the vast continent I had to cross before reaching his capital also belongs to him. In all his possessions I found temples of the Roman church, with countless followers. If Your Majesty has doubts of his intentions, it is only because Your Majesty has not visited the lands under his power. The kingdom of Spain places great importance on the dissemination of their faith, and they have become exceedingly effective at it.”

Shō Nei looked at him with contempt. “You’re letting yourself be played as a piece in Felipe’s game. Surely you remember the executions in Nagasaki.”

Tsunenaga lowered his gaze. He knew well about that incident. A couple of decades earlier, a Spanish galleon bound for Acapulco had shipwrecked in Shikoku, and during his interrogation he had boasted of the prowess of his homeland. In response, the Shōgun had ordered dozens of converts to be crucified. Far from discouraging Christianity in Japan, the sentencing had turned them into revered martyrs.

“I may be but a vassal king, but I still have my informers. I heard what that captain told the lord of Shikoku. It was an imprudent misstep on his part, but it does explain much of what is happening in Japan. He said there is an invasion plan underway. Priests are actually the first line in a meticulous, large-scale offensive. The conquest plan is always the same: wherever the king of Spain has sent priests, he’s not long in sending soldiers. And Japan already has priests.”

“The priests came years ago, Your Majesty. In all this time, Spain has sent no armies to Japan.”

“But when you see your lord, you will give him an enumeration of cities, officers, castles and ships. You may not intend it so, but what he will gather from your report is not mere news, but a warning. And when he reports to the Shōgun, the result will be the banning of Christianity and the expulsion of all priests from Japan.”

Tsunenaga nodded reluctantly. “It is true that he might decide to do that.”

“But you would not be the one to make the suggestion.”

Tsunenaga found no words to say to that, and the king’s eyes showed the satisfaction of a correct conclusion. “You are a loyal emissary of your lord. You don’t wish to see your country enslaved by foreigners. But at some point in your journey, the Spanish religion seduced you. You joined them. And now you’re loyal to their god, too.”

“I am aware of my duties.”

The king considered the troubled man sitting in front of him and said, “In their way from Manila to the larger islands of Japan, a few of those priests have stopped by my realm. They have spoken to my people. I have let them build temples where they gather and worship their Heavenly Lord. I even asked one of them to come to my palace and explain his religion to me. He spoke a pitiful Japanese, but I listened.” That account brought light to Tsunenaga’s eyes, and the king hastened to quench his hopes. “You should not imagine that I became a Christian. The doctrine they bring is a strange and at times heartless one. To be born only once, to be allowed to err only once in all eternity—that is a teaching I cannot accept. I suppose that is why Europeans want to get everything done at once: they fear they shall not have another chance.” Seeing that his guest remained silent, he went on, “I wonder what about that religion lured you.”

The ambassador himself didn’t fully understand the nuances of Catholic theology, and he wished he’d had more time in Europe to learn Latin properly and read the commentaries by the Fathers of the Church, but one thing his confessor had made very clear to him was how the apostles had been fearless in giving witness before the temporal powers, even before the perverted Caesars of Rome. Looking directly at Shō Nei’s eyes for the first time, he said, very calmly, “I have sworn my soul over to the Son of the Heavenly Lord. I don’t pretend to know his mind, but I do trust his all-encompassing forgiveness.”

“You know the Lord Buddha teaches universal compassion too.”

“The Lord Buddha did not give his blood to save me.”

“Of course not. The Lord Buddha teaches that no one but you can save you. But I see that the god of the Spanish has got you fully convinced.” Tsunenaga nodded, having exhausted all his bravery in that confession. “Look, I still get news of what goes on in Edo. From what I hear, the Spanish religion doesn’t have a future in Japan.” He looked at his own hands, which a decade before had fought for independence and lost. “I am old, more a denizen of the next world than this. What little effort I could spare would be useless against your devotion. But Lord Masamune is still strong, and has a wider variety of tools.”

Tsunenaga couldn’t stop himself from shaking at the reminder of the increasing tendency to torture converts. “I must see him nonetheless. I must complete my work.”

Shō Nei leaned toward him, and in his expression Tsunenaga could see he was sincerely concerned. “As much as I dislike this new doctrine, it has a few good principles, which no one with a good heart will disagree with. One of them is that it is impossible to serve two masters.”

“I thank Your Majesty’s generous advice. But having seen Spain with my eyes, and having talked to the people who live and rule there, I am confident that they bear no ill will toward us.”

“Your capacity for self-deception is impressive. Let me clarify your situation for you: if you talk to your lord, your religion will suffer; if you don’t, your country will. Either you don’t recognize the danger, or you do and are too terrified to name it.” The king sighed, wishing he hadn’t revealed so much about the ways a human being could fail. “I know something about trying to avert an invasion. It is the kind of endeavor that can define a life. Believe me, you don’t want to give yourself reason to live in regret.”

An enigmatic smile appeared on Tsunenaga’s face. “I am moved by Your Majesty’s wish to save me. I would prefer, however, the humble joy of helping save Your Majesty.”

“I thought you wanted to ask a favor of me. You’ve been asking for a ship since you appeared.”

“Yes, and I still need it. But if I could, before leaving these islands, present to Your Majesty the good news of the Son of the Heavenly Lord, my mission would be even more complete.”

Shō Nei chuckled, feeling more pity than any real offense at the ambassador’s presumptuousness. “I am nearing death, but you arrived at the right time for me. You need not worry. I have listened to your good news. You have already saved me.”

Tsunenaga tried to find something to say, but was too surprised to form any coherent thought.

“That will be all. You will board the first ship departing from Shuri. You may leave me now.”

Japanese was not spoken aboard the ship, so Tsunenaga had no one to ask how many days it would take them to get to Sendai.

When they reached a town he didn’t recognize and they dragged him out of the ship without explanation, he had no one to ask where he’d landed.

His life did not end then and there, but he was going to spend the rest of it learning how simply, with the quiet wrath of a deathbed curse, the king of the Ryūkyūs had taken revenge on Japan.

Noon, September 23 (Gregorian), 1620

Yuegang

Making what his superiors would have judged too obvious an attempt at discretion, the waiter maintained no eye contact with Xiaobo as he brought her the plate of lamb skewers she’d ordered and tapped twice with his fingernail the bowl of dark tea she hadn’t. She closed her eyes, to refrain from chastising his clumsiness, and started eating the roasted meat. She kept a conscious count of the number of times she’d taken a bite and swallowed it before it would look natural for her to take the bowl in her hands, remove the lid, use it to push the leaves aside, and drink the tea. She was anxious to see the bottom of the bowl, but she had to avoid finishing it in one gulp, lest she drew the slightest curiosity. In her first assignments, closer to her hometown in the inner plains of China, a more carefree behavior would have been acceptable, but here, in a port city full of barbarians, she could afford no mistakes.

It didn’t escape her that her own people, not too many generations before, had counted as barbarians. It was primarily to make a point, which few understood anyway, that a Hui volunteered to serve in the protection of the Great Ming that had expelled her forebears’ conquerors.

After an extended display of relaxedness that was in truth an expenditure of her patience, she finally drank enough sips of the tea to read, upon raising the bowl to her face, the secret message painted at the bottom of it. It had just two words, “serious illness,” in a fast, almost careless calligraphy. She spat out some tea to cover the words and with a deliberate air of naturalness set the bowl back on the table. She ate the remaining pieces of lamb as she considered the implications. Hers was not a position from which she could do something meaningful about that news, but her training made her view unpreparedness as irresponsible.

Her mind hadn’t yet reached any conclusion by the time she paid for her meal and walked outside to check on her quarry. Earlier that day she’d been alerted to the arrival in town of a strange man who didn’t speak Chinese but had been drawing Chinese words in the dirt begging for food and assistance. By the description of his rich clothes she’d already inferred he must be Japanese, but the Japanese were not allowed to set foot in China, so his presence demanded an explanation. No one understood his pleading cries, and he had stayed at that same corner for hours, desperately redrawing the same words every time people walked over them. Her superiors had selected her to keep an eye on him because she had studied the barbarian languages. In a crowded port like Yuegang, it was impossible to do a job like hers without knowing Portuguese and Dutch at the very least, but she was also trained in Japanese, Ryūkyūan, Mongolian, Thai, Tibetan, and Persian. She felt she couldn’t do less than be equipped to deal with every conceivable enemy of China.

She turned the corner and saw, as she expected, the Japanese man still sitting on his spot. The words he had carved on the dirt were WISH HELP STOMACH VOID. She mentally retraced the Japanese sentence he must have been trying to compose, and felt a chill of empathy. From her inquiries during the morning she’d learned Ryūkyūan captains were under orders to not let him aboard their ships, which had to mean he was considered dangerous. His clothes marked him as a lord of some importance, but he’d been thrown ashore without his sword and, more obviously, without his retinue. If he was planning any action against China, he’d chosen an extremely ineffective way of going about it.

One street away she saw a group of men staring at her. They seemed to have noticed her interest in the stranger. Such attention would have been hard to avoid. She wore, not only for her assignments but in her daily life, the attire of a government eunuch, which she had chosen as a survival strategy to make a living, but also meant stealth was never an option. She made a snap calculation of risks and walked toward the stranger as swiftly as she could, which wasn’t much, and greeted him in Japanese. “I can get you food and shelter. You’re not safe out here.”

The man looked at her with sudden gratitude, and the painful slowness with which he stood up made her suspect he’d been hungry since before he’d reached the town. “I will be greatly in your debt, sir. I need to return to Japan with urgency.”

The corner of her eye perceived the approach of three men; in front of her, an alleyway led to one possible route to her safehouse. “We need to go.”

With a gesture, she led him into the alleyway, letting him walk in front of her because she knew what was coming. They were just out of the line of sight from the street when she positioned her feet for a quick turn. Then she felt a hand on her shoulder.

“What’s the hurry?” said a man’s voice.

Bending her torso to free her shoulder, she turned on her heel, faced her follower and grabbed the base of his forearm, extending a finger to press a sensitive spot between the bones of the elbow joint. “Leave,” she warned.

Two more men ran to join the first, who closed his free hand and aimed a jab at Xiaobo’s jaw. With a shove from her grasping hand, she forced him to turn, sending his fist over her shoulder and scraping it on the wall.

As he retreated in pain and the other two struggled to move past him, she took a step back and assessed her chances. The next hit missed her head entirely as she threw herself to the ground, rolling into a crouch. The second assailant, surprised at the move, approached her with the intent to land a kick, believing he had thrown her down.

He was wrong. That was her fighting stance.

She proceeded to confuse her attackers, shifting her low position with impossible flexibility in the narrow space of the alleyway, pivoting on her arms or rolling on her back so she ended up always beyond or between or behind or below their attempts to strike. She rolled on the floor and around their legs with expert precision, keeping her torso down and extending her arms to block their fists and throw them at one another, twisting their limbs or pushing their joints so they wasted momentum, inserting her feet between theirs to lock their motion and sweep them off balance, constantly repositioning herself to stay vexingly out of their range of motion. It should not be possible to fight while lying down, but with that style she comfortably threw each of them headfirst at the walls until they all lay unconscious and bleeding.

She rose to her feet and checked on the man from Japan. She was about to ask him how he was, but the way he was staring at her cut off that line of conversation. That look was known to her. Even if he hadn’t recognized her official robes, he’d heard her voice, and now showed the typical embarrassment of a man who knew he owed his life to a eunuch.

“Just be glad it ended,” she muttered as she led the way toward the safehouse. A moment later, upon hearing no footsteps from him, she turned back and grabbed his shoulders. “A man bred like you was probably trained to fight, but you don’t have your sword and you haven’t eaten. So stop sulking and come.” The suspicion that he might be an agent from the Shōgun sent to launch an attack against the Emperor of China now seemed unfounded to her, but she still felt curious for his story. With a resigned sigh, Xiaobo added, “My name is Ma Liang. I work for the Great Ming. If you are not an enemy of China, you have nothing to fear from me.” He kept looking at the ground in silence, and her patience was nearing its limit. “Can you at least tell me why you were brought here?”

With his gaze still pointed downward, he said, “You didn’t kick them.” Then she realized he was looking at her padded shoes.

She stepped back, feeling unmasked. “Why would that matter?”

“You’re right that I’m in no condition to defend myself. But in Japan we, too, know something of fighting styles.” He pointed at the three men slowly bleeding to death in the alleyway. “They gave you plenty of openings where the most efficient move for you would have been a kick. And every time, you refused that option.”

She resorted to outrage to try to deflect his chain of thought. “It’s bold of you to presume to give lessons to the one who fended off your muggers.”

He looked up. “I apologize for my thoughtless words. You have done a great good to me, and the rest of my years will be lived in debt to you. But I know what the Chinese do to women’s feet.” He paused, wishing he could avoid the sentence that followed. “I think you aren’t really a eunuch.”

She replied with automatic coldness, “What I am is of no consequence to you.”

“I’m not Chinese, and I was able to figure it out. I’m sure anyone in this country who sees how you fight can make the same conclusion I did.”

She pointed at the bodies behind them. “Anyone unlucky enough to find out how I fight can’t reveal anything.” Then she drew her eyes closer to his. “And anyone unwise enough to say a word will find out how I fight.”

“I wasn’t planning to betray you.”

“Are you coming with me, then? Out here, your elegant clothes won’t take long to engender more greed.”

“I don’t know where you want to take me. Where I need to go is back to Japan.”

“Not happening,” she said as she resumed walking. “Whoever you crossed in Liuqiu doesn’t want to see you.”

“It makes no sense! I saved the king!”

That made her stop. Very slowly she turned back to him, not sure how to take that news. “What do you mean exactly?”

“The king of the Ryūkyūs was near death, but I arrived just in time to save him.”

“How?” Her voice had acquired an urgency that he, in his indignation, didn’t perceive. “How did you save the king? How did you know what to do? How sick was he?”

“It was the will of the Heavenly Lord.”

That turn of phrase knocked at a door in her memory. “The Portuguese speak like that. Are you saying you can beseech their god?”

As soon as he nodded, she searched within her clothes until she drew out a wooden badge with words carved in black ink. “You’re coming with me. Your arrival in this town has become a matter of state.” She resumed walking, holding him by the arm in a practiced manner he recognized as difficult to wiggle out of.

“Why? What do you want with me? Who are you?”

She showed him her badge again. “I work for the Eastern Bureau, and that means you’ll do as I say.”

“What’s an Eastern Bureau?”

“The Emperor’s secret police. I’ll have to send a letter to the capital, advising they stop whatever they’re doing, which should buy us some time while we get there.”

“Won’t you tell me what’s happening?”

Without stopping, she replied, “I received a message today. The Emperor of China lies on his deathbed, and you seem to have a talent for saving sovereigns. You and I are making a visit to the Forbidden City.”

Night, September 29 (Gregorian), 1620

Beijing

Secret police agent Ma Xiaobo, operating under the guise of Ma Liang, was summoned to the office of her superior after her botched attempt to smuggle an unallowed foreigner into the Palace of Heavenly Purity by using her authority as a member of the secret police to sneak by the closed gates of the city. At every level, the Eastern Bureau was managed by government eunuchs, but here the officer in charge of the institution—Wei Zhongxian, Chief Eunuch of the Great Ming—was the superior of all her superiors, responsible for thousands of spies across the empire and, in every way that mattered, the most powerful man in China.

She bowed and sat before him, waiting for him to speak first. As far as she recalled, they had only rarely spoken directly to each other, when she’d had to deliver a message of a sensitive nature in the capital. Most of the time, he was busy enough chasing traitors in the complex of administrative buildings that formed the Forbidden City. The way he stared at her across the desk was unmistakable: he had more serious matters to think of, and she should be prepared to offer an acceptable excuse to merit his attention.

“Agent Ma Liang, I have just wasted hours of work reviewing your assignment history. The picture that this office has of you is that of an efficient, resourceful, and loyal member. Did we miss a side of you that you were hiding until now?”

“Your reports on me are accurate, Chief Eunuch.”

“I should hope so. Inaccurate information is the bane of any government, but unreliable officers are worse. In view of your impeccable record, how do you explain the irresponsible lack of judgment that drove you to risk execution tonight?”

“I found a man who can save the Emperor’s life.”

“The Emperor has medics whose job it is to do that.”

“Chief Eunuch, you know better than I do that the personnel in the palace are not wholly on the Emperor’s side.”

“The Emperor has guards whose job it is to uncover traitors.”

She refrained from pointing out that even the Embroidered Guard could be compromised. She needed to focus on helping her own case. “Every guard in the palace knows that I’m not a traitor and I wouldn’t do anything against the Emperor’s life.”

Wei was breathing loudly by now. “Have you lost your memory? Just five years ago, a court eunuch helped an assassin enter the palace. Didn’t you pause to consider how it would look for you to do the same?”

“But it’s not the same.”

“The soldiers who have orders to shoot invaders don’t know that. Who even is this barbarian?”

“He’s a diplomatic envoy from Japan.”

“I know that. Don’t waste my time telling me things I know. My informants in Liuqiu have written to me about his audience with their king.”

“Then you must know he tended to his illness.”

Wei dropped silent. He quickly regained control of himself and replied, “The reports didn’t mention that. What does an ambassador know of remedies?”

“He’s not a medic,” she replied. “That’s a good thing, actually; there’s no risk of him poisoning the Emperor.” She knew how to stress the right words to make the implication clear. Among the rumors that their office had gathered about the Emperor’s illness was that court pharmacist Li Kezhuo might not be making his best effort to keep him alive.

“If he’s not a medic, what’s he supposed to be able to do?”

“He will pray.”

Wei chuckled. “Are you serious?”

“This man follows the doctrine of the Jesuits. He can use the help of their god to save the Emperor.”

The eunuch closed his eyes with firmness, a gesture he often used when presented with nonsense. “The fact that the Eastern Bureau gets to ignore judicial procedures doesn’t mean we get to ignore Confucian rites. Invoking barbarian gods is not the way we do things. Maybe you haven’t had a chance to speak to Jesuits, but I have. They love to tell stories of miraculous healings, none of them true. How do you intend to cure the Emperor with a false teaching that has been banned from Beijing?”

Xiaobo considered her reply. She was a servant of the Great Ming, but she was also a Hui, a Muslim. The main reason, which she’d never admitted out loud, why she’d been willing to go so far for Hasekura was that the god of the Jesuits was the same as the god of her people, the Most Compassionate, the Most Merciful. If she succeeded at steering the events so that the Emperor would owe his life to her god, then the one true faith would have an opportunity to be more respected in the empire. But the Han had their own gods, and wouldn’t hear of any other. In the end, she appealed to the simplest of arguments. “In this past week, the king of Liuqiu hasn’t died, has he?”

Wei had no idea, but only gave a dismissive huff. The question had placed him in a difficult spot. It would have been unthinkable for him of all people to admit ignorance, but that meant he had no plausible rebuttal. On second thought, it dawned on him that giving Liang permission to go ahead with such an outlandish proposal could help quench much of the tension that was sure to erupt if, in fact, the Emperor ended up dying. The royal family would be happy to scapegoat an ignorant barbarian and even a naïve servant of the empire if it spared them a chain of fratricides. “Very well,” he said with a blank face. “It may even raise the Emperor’s spirits to see such a spectacle. Proceed.”

Outside Wei’s office, Hasekura Tsunenaga stood in waiting while his rescuer endured interrogation. The Emperor’s condition, as far as they knew, had not changed, but again, he had no one to ask. He could tell that the exquisitely dressed soldier in charge of watching him during Xiaobo’s interview, a member of the prestigious elite force known as the Embroidered Guard, had ten thousand questions to ask him, which would have to wait until she returned, if she returned.

Not knowing Chinese made the wait more disturbing to him, because the corridors in the Eastern Bureau were a meshwork of whispers, swarmed with finely robed officials who never looked ahead as they walked but instead exchanged quiet nods and cryptic gestures on which millions of lives depended. Hasekura, who in his homeland had occupied a rather modest position in the apparatus of government, felt tiny amid the flow of messages whose consequences bore more weight that his individual fate. Not even the courts in Madrid and Rome, where the world was being run, had had such a disconcerting effect on him.

One eunuch walked directly toward him and addressed him in Portuguese. “You come from Liuqiu?”

Hasekura didn’t reply immediately, as much because he was surprised that anyone in Beijing wished to talk to him as because his Spanish only allowed him a limited grasp of its sister tongue. He glanced at the guard assigned to him, hoping that his unspoken request for permission to converse would be understood. Upon hearing the barest of grunts, he decided to take that as encouragement. “That is true,” he said in a very slow Spanish that had no assurance of being understood. In any case, the eunuch smiled and proceeded to ask more questions. Their exchange dragged for a long hour, during which Hasekura retold who he was, whom he served, where he’d been and what work he’d done there, and how badly he needed to be given passage to Japan. He didn’t know who this man was or why he’d been sent to probe him, but for the past week he’d been so desperate for a helpful pair of ears that he jumped, unthinking, at the chance to make his case before someone who might be in a position to arrange for his trip home.

Only after their talk ended and the eunuch left did it occur to Hasekura that the Chinese government shouldn’t have known to send someone who spoke Portuguese.

Xiaobo exited Chief Eunuch Wei’s office looking slightly less worried. Hasekura thanked God that she was still alive. She greeted him, then spoke to the guard in Chinese. “What’s the word around the palace?”

“Your letter stirred everyone’s nerves.”

“As it should.”

“You’re lucky that it jumped from regional office to regional office until it reached me.”

“Then it did its job,” she replied with unconcealed pride.

“Don’t gloat,” he warned. “Lady Zheng has heard of this, and to put it mildly, she’s not happy.”

Xiaobo’s smile faded. Lady Zheng, the previous Emperor’s favorite concubine, the mother of a failed pretender to the throne, and the daughter of a high-ranking officer in the Embroidered Guard, was the main reason why Xiaobo didn’t get a moment of rest in protecting the Emperor, or her true identity.

“You have to be careful with whatever it is you’re planning. It’s no small matter to have brought a barbarian into the Forbidden City.”

“I intend to take him to the Emperor,” she whispered.

The guard’s face lost its color. “How are you going to pull that off? Every minister will oppose it.”

She smiled quietly. “You will help, of course.”

He began to protest, but held himself. It was technically true that the Eastern Bureau had the authority to enlist the Embroidered Guard for tasks pertaining to the protection of the empire. Xiaobo, who even to this closest of allies posed as the eunuch Liang, took her leave and signaled Hasekura to follow her.

She took him out of the building and looked around them before saying, “You will talk to the Emperor. I’ve made sure of it.”

“Rome has already sent missionaries here. Why is it so important that he hears me?”

“I didn’t take all the risks I took to have you chat with him. I brought you as a healer.”

“What? I’m no healer.”

She sat on the steps outside of the palace complex to rest her feet for a while. They had not been bound for very long, but their full strength would never come back. “You said you were a healer. You saved the king of Liuqiu.”

Hasekura opened his mouth, but no sound came out. His heart was busy searching for an exit from his body, and his back shook from a sudden cascade of cold sweat. He saw for the first time how gravely she had misunderstood him and how trapped he was as a result. “What… what am I supposed to do to the Emperor?”

“The same thing you did in Liuqiu.”

“But will I even be admitted to his presence?” he asked, hopeful for some way that her plan could fail.

“Leave that to me. The Chief Eunuch has granted me his permission, and Guard Guangkui has access to the Emperor’s private chamber.”

“Is that the guard—”

“He is.”

He mulled over his self-inflicted predicament and asked, “What happens if the Emperor dies before I see him?”

“No, that won’t happen. Guangkui has instructions to keep soldiers watching him and to use a taster for his medicines. Trust me on this: I will not allow him to die.”

“But what if he does?”

She decided to be honest. “Someone may use that as an excuse to have us executed.” His terrified face prompted further explanation. “The Emperor has enemies in his own family.”

“How does that relate to us?”

She looked around them. The paths between government buildings appeared empty, but she knew all the ways someone could lurk in unseen spaces. She continued to speak in a hush, praying that Lady Zheng’s servants didn’t understand Japanese. “The previous Emperor wanted to give the throne to the son he’d had with his favorite concubine, but the law favored the eldest, who reigns now.”

“I can see why that would bother her.”

She gave the slightest nod. “Five years ago, she hired an assassin. He was stopped, but she managed to avoid punishment.”

“Where is she now?”

“She still has her own palace in the Forbidden City. We suspect she’s behind the Emperor’s sickness.”

“Do you have proof?”

Her voice became almost inaudible. “Lady Zheng arranged for an orgy to follow the coronation. She made sure everyone heard she’d hired the prostitutes as a gesture of reconciliation. The Emperor fell ill the next day.”

Hasekura took a moment to process all the intrigue he’d fallen into. Suddenly it occurred to him to ask, “Does her son live?”

She waved the question away. “Yes, but far. He has no claim to the throne anyway.”

“Then why is she hurting the Emperor?”

With a sigh that came from a sore place, Xiaobo replied, “To be honest, I can’t blame her. She has become a widow. In China, that means her own life is over too.”

His mind made a connection. “Is that what happened to you?” She opened her eyes wide and had another quick look around them. He went on, “Feet are only bound if the girl is to marry. You must have been too young when he died. You had to find a way to support yourself.”

“You shouldn’t talk so loudly,” she snapped. “Why did your lord even give you a diplomatic job?”

Seeing the truth at last, he confessed, “I was expendable.”

She examined his clothes. “I thought you were something of a lord yourself.”

“A minor one. I was given this assignment as a chance to improve my family’s name.”

She wanted to know what exactly had caused his family to fall into disrepute, but chose to let him keep some pride. “I think you’ve done plenty to bring merit to yourself, with enough to spare for your grandchildren.”

“What good is that? Can’t you see that I’m stuck here?”

“Only for now. After you do your magic on the Emperor, things should go back to normal. He might even allow you to leave China.”

“How are you so sure I’ll have a chance to talk to him?”

“You will. Guangkui is on our side.”

“He’s just a guard. What can he do?”

“He’s the Emperor’s nephew.”

Morning, October 1 (Gregorian), 1620

Beijing

The private chamber of Emperor Taichang at the Palace of Heavenly Purity was filled with ministers and councilors and priests who murmured speculations and accusations that were hushed down the moment the foreigner was led inside. Even after receiving repeated promises that not a finger would be laid on him, he found the number of strangers intimidating. Without Guangkui and Xiaobo by his side, he knew he would’ve been executed on sight.

He heard her speak into his ear, “Do it now,” and was pushed toward the royal bed.

Of the wide circle of people standing at the maximum possible distance from the Emperor, he tried to guess which was the court pharmacist. He suspected it must be the one who appeared the most displeased with his intrusion. Avoiding the indignant gaze as soon as he met it, he directed his attention to the bed, which occupied more than half the room and he thought to be larger than the boat that had rescued him at the Ryūkyūs. Upon approaching it, he understood why everyone kept so far from it: the aroma of incense was there to mask the stench of loose bowels. The precise nature of the affliction had not been made clear to him, but he sensed he was expected to be able to deal with anything. He was trying to recall the prayers of his conversion when his mind went blank at the sight of the Emperor’s face.

He had forgotten that this was a newly crowned ruler, an inexperienced man on whose shoulders a world had been dropped. His face, simultaneously youthful and cadaveric, struck Tsunenaga as a contradiction in the order of the world, an incongruous first footprint of death on territory where it didn’t belong. It also reminded him that he was not before a divine being, as emperors everywhere claimed to be, but a vulnerable creature of this world. The man who could order anyone’s death had no power over his own. Reassured that one fearful of God ought to fear nothing from a man, he stepped closer to the soiled bedsheets and began reciting, “Pater noster qui es in caelis…”

“That’s the secret tongue of the barbarians!” cried the officer whose gaze had scared him before. Tsunenaga, not knowing what had been said against him or, if he was honest, what he was saying himself, went on without noticing the gesture with which Xiaobo had just urged that angry man to let him finish. He accompanied the Pater noster with an Ave Maria, a Credo and a Gloria in excelsis Deo, and with that he ran out of all the Latin he knew.

He turned to Xiaobo. “The Heavenly Lord will take care of him now,” he said in Japanese. She waved him out of the room and, along with Guangkui, hurried out of the palace.

After leaving Tsunenaga under the vigilance of the Embroidered Guard, Xiaobo sought an unoccupied office in the barracks to speak with Guangkui. “You didn’t tell me he was that ill,” she said after closing the door.

“He was improving last week. When your letter arrived, I had all the kitchen staff replaced and appointed a guard to follow the medic at all times.”

“What happened, then?” She sat beside the writing table, grateful for the opportunity to rest her feet.

“That pharmacist, Li Kezhuo. He went behind the medic and prescribed another remedy.”

“Didn’t the taster catch it?”

Guangkui raised empty palms. “I don’t know what happened. The taster didn’t report anything wrong with it.”

Xiaobo held her head in one hand, trying to unravel the problem. “Either the pharmacist or the taster is working for Lady Zheng.”

“Neither of them has visited her. My guards have checked.”

“Then we’re looking for someone who is loyal to her and is already employed in the Emperor’s palace.”

“I don’t see how any servant could ignore orders from the Embroidered Guard.”

They exchanged a glance and knew the answer. “Unless they’re receiving different orders from Lady Zheng’s father,” gasped Xiaobo. “He must have told the taster to skip one remedy.”

Guangkui’s mouth tensed with apprehension. “If he’s involved, I can’t help you. He outranks me.”

Her eyes lit up with an idea. “But your mother outranks him.”

He frowned. “What are you planning now?”

She stood up, thinking fast. “Do you keep anything written by your mother?”

“I think so.”

“Good. I’m going to need you to lend me one of those papers. Something like a letter. It’ll be more useful the longer it is. If this goes well, I can get that man out of our way.”

Morning, October 4 (Gregorian), 1620

Beijing

The Emperor lived.

A public celebration was decreed in the capital, with visits made to the Forbidden City temples by the royal family, although the intensity of the festivities was somewhat tempered by the recent memory of the coronation and its ensuing illness. For most of the day, Tsunenaga remained lodged in a soldier barrack, as palace advisors had deemed him undeserving of an official guest room. He spent his hours between prayer and boredom, watched by guards personally selected by Guangkui, until a messenger came and spoke to the guard on duty.

Tsunenaga was taken out and escorted into the palace, where he met with Xiaobo. She explained that he had nothing to worry about; soldiers surrounded him only because the Emperor had asked to see him.

They were informed that the audience would be held in the Hall of Mental Cultivation, one of the minor buildings surrounding the main palace. He entered accompanied by Xiaobo and a clerk from the Ministry of Rites, who instructed him, with the help of her translation, on the proper greeting he should give. He did as told: he bowed, he recited the salutation, and sat in the middle of the hall, at the prescribed distance from the Emperor’s seat.

Seeing Taichang in full health gave him a sense of unrealness; this couldn’t be the same person as that pitiful mass of filth he’d seen a mere week before. In front of him sat a man who knew his assuredness could overpower any who saw his face, save for this visitor, whose first memory of him had been etched indelibly beneath the smell of incense.

“Are you the man who saved my life?” Xiaobo transmitted the meaning into Tsunenaga’s ear.

“It pleased the Heavenly Lord to do it, Your Majesty.” She translated back to the Emperor, beaming with pride.

“I called for you because I thought I should give you an appropriate welcoming. I wasn’t conscious when you visited my quarters, but your prayers brought me back from the brink of death.”

“I am blessed to have been an instrument of the Heavenly Lord.”

“However, it is my understanding that you arrived in China for other reasons. You could have been executed if my agent hadn’t found you first. Why did you disobey the ban on Japanese people in Chinese ports?”

“I did not plan to come here, Your Majesty. I was headed for my hometown, Sendai. Now I am inclined to believe there was a providential force pushing me here.”

The Emperor did not reply immediately, for the thought that he’d been favored by spiritual powers alien to his country’s tradition made him feel uncertain of his footing in the world. His lineage kept the throne with the consent of Heaven; if it became common knowledge that he’d resorted to barbarian rites, his legitimacy could be open to question. Claiming the mandate of Heaven while keeping a debt to a god whose priests had been expelled from the capital by his father was an anomaly, a halfway state that couldn’t last. He needed to find out how far his debt reached. “I want to reward you for the service you’ve done to China.” He caught the beginning of a glimmer of hope in Tsunenaga’s eyes, and clarified, “Anything except leaving China.”

When Xiaobo whispered the translation, Tsunenaga felt as if the main branch of a tree had been cut off inside of him. Seven years of wandering had just been thrown away. His report, which could provide the sole defense against the conquest of Japan, would not be received. His wife and his son would not see him again. With barely any voice and no expectations, he pled, “May I at least write letters to my lord and my family?”

The Emperor shook his head, and before Tsunenaga could inquire any further, Xiaobo raised a hand to signal him to stop. It would be a serious breach of protocol to force the Emperor to explain himself, although she knew, and she promised herself she’d explain to him afterwards, that the Japanese government must not find out that one of their samurai was effectively a prisoner; the Great Ming had enough enemies already.

Tsunenaga took a resigned breath. He saw no point in further conversation.

“What do you ask in return?” insisted the Emperor.

The question shook Tsunenaga. Was there any important thing left in the world? Other than fulfilling his duty to the lord of Sendai, what else mattered? He saw the answer and spoke. “At least allow the Jesuits back.” Xiaobo let out a gasp, which she hoped would be forgotten as soon as she relayed the shocking words to the Emperor. “Grant them full freedom to preach, to build churches, to make converts and ordain new priests from among the citizens of the empire.” She wasn’t sure how the Emperor was going to react to that, but she was sure she wouldn’t have aspired to that much for her own religion. “And they must be given the opportunity to teach their doctrine to Your Majesty.” She stared at Tsunenaga, aghast at his boldness.

“What did he say? Speak!”

Dutifully, she translated the last sentence, and Taichang’s mouth tightened before turning into a half-smile.

“Done,” he replied. “Anything else?”

Xiaobo kept her eyes aimed at the floor, not wishing to give even the slightest appearance of influencing the response. Lifting the ban on the Jesuits was a step in quite a different direction from what she’d expected. Her hopes of more space for Islam began to quaver. Tsunenaga noticed her distress, but he had no idea of her own stakes in the matter, and made a riskier assumption. “If I may make another request of Your Majesty’s generosity, I think some consideration should be given to ending the custom of binding women’s feet.”

Xiaobo suppressed a yelp of horror and started to quickly think of alternatives for what to say instead. She would have preferred to remain silent, but the towering presence of her sovereign compelled her to speak. After a burst of mental effort that she felt interminable, she said, “An equal measure of rights should be granted, without distinction, to every religion that is practiced throughout the Great Ming.”

Giving no sign of having sensed any deception, Taichang said, “I’ll have to think it over.”

Instead of translating that, she told Tsunenaga, “I just saved your life.”

The Emperor ordered food to be brought, and the conversation turned to more mundane affairs. Xiaobo found the seasoning pleasant, both sweet and spicy. Tsunenaga was questioned on his homeland, his family, and the finer points of his duties as a member of the samurai class. Xiaobo took the chance to learn more about Japanese customs. Even at an occasion of low danger, she remained alert.

“You shouldn’t have done that,” she said to Tsunenaga, once they were beyond earshot of the Emperor’s palace.

“He was in a generous mood. I wanted to do something for you.”

Her hands grasped each other to avoid hitting him. “You don’t have to do anything for me.” She wanted to yell, but remembered not to. “Actually, you can’t do anything for me. A decree won’t fix my feet.”

“Don’t you wish to spare other women from the binding?”

“The idea won’t be deemed acceptable if it’s presented by a foreigner. You could’ve gotten yourself executed!”

“I can’t believe I can’t do anything for you. Are you really done using me?”

A wave of shame fell upon her. He was so oblivious to what she aspired to use him for, and she hadn’t told him half of what hinged on the Emperor’s survival. She would have said more at that moment, but was interrupted by a guard who notified her that Noble Consort Zheng was asking to speak with her.

The rows of small palaces for royal concubines looked so similar it took her a while to figure out which one to enter. She could almost empathize with the way her enemy felt; after so many years as the center of the late Wanli’s affections, it had to be a blow to Zheng’s pride to find herself with no marks of distinction above his other lovers.

Once she found the correct building, she was led to the hall used for receptions. She found Lady Zheng sitting at one extreme of the room, her back curved in the way of old women, and Xiaobo shuddered as she considered her own future and how much longer she’d be able to pose as a man. Xiaobo greeted her and sat at a respectful distance, not sure of what would be discussed or how much danger she was in.

“Congratulations,” said Lady Zheng. “You won.”

So we’re jumping right into it, thought Xiaobo. With a polite smile, she retorted, “Now that the Emperor is safe, no one should think themselves the loser.”

“Liang, please. I’m tired of the way eunuchs twist the words to hide what they mean. Can we be direct for a change?”

“As you wish.”

“You say no one loses in this affair. Yet I’m the one being punished.”

“How? No harm has been done to you.”

Zheng put her hands on her knees and straightened her back, which looked painful. “I was denied the coronation of my son!”

“Since you’ve asked me to be direct, I’ll be direct: such talk is treason. What you were denied was something you had no right to claim. As I said, that’s no harm.”

“Traditions, traditions! Isn’t the title of Emperor worth anything? Shouldn’t his parting gift to his lover be honored?”

“That’s an argument he already had, many times, years ago, and lost. I see no point in you arguing it with me.”

“You… you have played well. I heard the Embroidered Guard received orders to reassign my father, and I refuse to believe Princess Rongchang had anything to do with it. You’re good at making everyone believe you’re so unimportant.”

“I serve the Great Ming.”

“Do you? Then why do you lie to the Emperor’s face?”

Xiaobo felt her insides twist in pain. “When have I ever—”

“I still have people near the Emperor, you see. And some of them understand Japanese.”

Tsunenaga. I should have let him doom himself. “I admit that I did the ambassador a favor. A barbarian who can’t appreciate the elegance of Chinese women has no business dictating how they should look.”

“A perfectly believable excuse. Well done. But that’s not all you did.”

“I merely restated the point he had already made.”

“No, Ma Liang. You added to it. Surely you’re aware of how obvious your surname is. Ma is all but the mark of Muslims.”

“What’s your point?”

“Don’t be afraid. We all seek our ways to utilize the Emperor to get things done. Didn’t you hear me a minute ago? I said congratulations.”

“What did you call me for, Lady Zheng?”

“I was hoping you would understand the way things look from my point of view. I’m only hated because Wanli loved me instead of another.”

“No, you’re hated because you plotted to have the rightful heir murdered. Twice.”

“Was any other avenue open to me? Should I embrace a quiet and chaste old age, as does every respectable woman? You know how unfair that is. In these times, life is a game that a widow cannot win. You ought to know.”

Xiaobo tried to show no reaction, but Zheng didn’t seem to need one.

“May I tell you a story? As it happens, I grew up not far from here.” Indeed, every member of the spy agency knew perfectly that Zheng came from the neighborhood of Daxing, but Xiaobo said nothing. She could tell the story would have a dangerous ending. “When I was a little girl, I met a very old spinster who made a living from weaving baskets. She wasn’t really a neighbor; she was more of a traveling saleswoman. Every week she’d pass in front of our house carrying her baskets. She had a funny way of walking, not exactly like a woman with bound feet, but still distinctive. One day, I mustered enough courage to stop her in the street and ask her directly why she walked that way. She looked at my feet, saw that they were already bound, and out of some deep sense of pity, she agreed to reveal her secret to me. As it turned out, she was the only child of a somewhat distinguished family that had fallen into hard times, and marrying her off would have been their only salvation from misery. She’d been betrothed three times, and for various reasons, the wedding was always canceled. Mostly it had to do with her family’s declining good name. The point is she never found a candidate again. No one wanted to be her fourth suitor, because ignorant people believe it’s bad luck to be the fourth anything, so she ended up unmarriageable and on the point of starving. When her parents died, she knew she’d have to support herself, and the first thing she had to do was to fix those useless feet. Can you imagine? I have to admire what she did to give herself a new life. It’s bad enough to be bound; it’s a pain none of us would have chosen willingly. But she, having already known that pain, decided to go through it again. She broke delicate bones that had taken years to heal from the first breaking and forced her feet back to their true size. Of course, a foot that has been bound and unbound isn’t much use either; she showed me what flabby pieces of meat result from the attempt. But that didn’t stop her, because she knew, as every woman knows, that once marriage is off the table, life will never be kind to us again.”

Xiaobo didn’t know what to do or what to say to pretend Zheng’s words didn’t directly relate to her. Since she’d created her disguise, her survival strategy had been to not even think of her womanhood. She’d become used to living with the hope that the truth would never be found if she taught herself to ignore it.

“Ever since you arrived in the capital, my people have informed me of the curious way you walk. It’s not like the gait of a bound woman, of course; you no longer bend your knees the way we do. But the way that basket weaver walked is unforgettable to me. Since I hadn’t yet seen you in person, I still had my doubts, but they vanished this morning, when one of my servants ran from the Hall of Mental Cultivation to tell me you’d just blocked an attempt to ban foot binding.”

“What does that have to do with whatever it is you’re imagining about me?”

“Tell me: how was your meal with the Emperor? Did you enjoy the seasoning?”

This time, Xiaobo’s reaction was evident. She’d paid little attention to the food because her mind had been too occupied considering the possible repercussions of Tsunenaga’s blunder, but she still remembered how curious it had tasted.

“That spicy sweet flavor was dong quai. It’s a pretty little herb with white flowers; I’m sure you would love it when it’s in full bloom. But it’s the root that we use. Oh, don’t worry about the Emperor; I’m told the new taster is good at his job, and dong quai has no effect on men anyway. It’s on women that it works. It’s usually taken by daughters of good families that need to get rid of an inconvenient pregnancy. But even in a woman who is not pregnant, a careless amount can cause copious bleeding.”

Xiaobo’s insides twisted again, and it was more than mere worry.

“You can keep insisting you’re not a woman hiding under those eunuch robes. Soon I will know.”

Morning, October 5 (Gregorian), 1620

Beijing

To Tsunenaga’s surprise, the Emperor summoned him for a second talk. He was again escorted out of the barracks and led, this time, to the garden behind the Palace of Heavenly Purity, where Taichang invited him to walk along an artificial canal decorated with carved stone fences. Tsunenaga was surprised to see that Xiaobo was not there. A court eunuch who spoke Portuguese greeted him and started walking alongside them. Without waiting for the customary salutation, Taichang began, “Yesterday was a full day. Things still need doing. Positions to fill, captains to promote. My father left many decisions unfinished, but that is true of every dead man.”

“Why is Your Majesty telling me all this?”

“Indeed, why you? I’ll tell you why: anyone else I may choose to talk to has some stake in my decisions. But you’re not from here, and if given the chance, you’d run away to your island. You don’t care how I run the empire, and that’s why I find I can tell you about it.”

Tsunenaga tried to divine what could be behind that outpour of honesty, and liked none of the possible explanations. “Is Your Majesty asking for my advice?” He had the suspicion that the translator was not fully competent in Portuguese, or maybe his own Spanish was the barrier, but it caused him anxiety to not know whether he was getting the full meaning.

“Maybe more than that. I still don’t know. My gratitude to you seems to not have been exhausted. I wish I could do more to show you my appreciation.”

“That is very gracious of Your Majesty.”

“Spare me the formulas. What do you wish for?”

He thought for a moment and said, “In my country, a man of my position displays his rank by carrying a sword in public.”

“A sword? Is that what you want?”

“If it’s at all possible, Your Majesty.”

“The necessary arrangements can be made to let you have one. Of course, I forbid you to carry it in my presence. But before commoners, it shouldn’t be a problem.”

“Thank you.”

The Emperor adopted a more serious expression. “Your request about religious freedom has given me much to consider.”

Xiaobo had omitted telling Tsunenaga what she’d said in his name, and he proceeded accordingly. “It wouldn’t be the first time that the ruler of a mighty empire opens the way for a new religion and gains even more glory for the empire. If Your Majesty allows me to tell the story of the Roman Constantine—”

“I’m not only thinking of the new. There are hundreds of traditions among my subjects, and I’ve been thinking that the way my father and all his fathers handled religion was too beholden to just one way of doing things.”

As the translator repeated this, Tsunenaga saw with alarm the implications of the Emperor’s plan. “But of all religions, only one is correct.”

“I’ve heard that, as much from the Jesuits as from every other breed of priest. Such arguments are not very convincing to me.”

Tsunenaga tried to remember the lives of saints he’d read in Spain, and what obstacles they’d found in their quest to evangelize. “An ordinary citizen may feel obliged by his lord, but you have the freedom to make up your own mind. If you tell your people what to believe, they will have to obey.”

“That is true. But we both know you’d like to be the one to tell me what to tell them.”

As if by agreement, they fell into a tense silence that was open on one end only; it was up to Tsunenaga to break it. He had to admit to himself that, since he’d departed for Spain seven years before, his life had consisted of a continuous series of reversals and frustrations. He’d failed to negotiate a trade route with Spain, he’d failed to obtain missionaries from the Pope, he’d failed to warn the lord of Sendai, and now he was going to fail to win China for Christ. “What am I doing here?”

“You’re here to provide me with a broader perspective. It isn’t thanks to Chinese rites or Chinese medicine or Chinese wisdom that I’m alive. Last night I ordered old archives to be brought to me. I spent hours reviewing the astronomical charts the Jesuits brought with them. I don’t know what half of it all means, but it does help me realize our situation. We close our ears at our peril. We need to abandon this poisonous idea that other cultures have nothing to teach us.”

Tsunenaga didn’t even think about it. “Is Your Majesty willing to listen to the teachings of the Heavenly Lord?”

“That’s not exactly where I was planning to start, but what have you got?”

He hesitated. He wanted to request a different translator; Spanish and Portuguese didn’t always harmonize with each other. “Excuse me, Your Majesty, but where is Ma Liang?”

“I don’t know. He must be on some other assignment. You’d have to ask the Chief Eunuch.” Seeing that Tsunenaga didn’t reply to that, he pressed on, “What is this doctrine that you’re so eager to tell me about?”

He resisted looking at the translator. His faith was struggling with his fear that the perennial truths he was going to repeat from memory would not be transmitted in full. He started very carefully, and begged God for guidance. “It is a doctrine of love, repentance, and forgiveness. We are all called to love the Heavenly Lord.”

“Who is your Heavenly Lord?”

“The maker of all things.” He hated to use such simplified terms, but he wanted to make sure nothing was distorted. “You— I mean, anyone who wants to become holy has to first repent of their sins and be reconciled to the Son of the Heavenly Lord.”

“You keep adding characters to the story. Now who’s the Son?”

“He is the promised king who will one day judge the world. All are destined to kneel before him.”

The Emperor smiled. “Tell me more.”

And thus did Hasekura Tsunenaga make his third mistake.

Afternoon, October 19 (Gregorian), 1620

Beijing

By order of the Emperor, Hasekura Tsunenaga was moved from the soldier barracks to a proper house in Beijing. Over the intervening weeks, Jesuit preachers were ordered to return from their exile in Macau. Having the opportunity to speak to these missionaries and to take communion again gave Tsunenaga great joy; they likewise let him know they were hopeful for the future of the Church in China as a result of his influence over the Emperor. Almost every day, he’d been summoned to explain the fundaments of the religion to him: the commandments, the sacraments, the kingdom of God, the position of Jesus, and particularly the story of Constantine, the man who had converted a whole empire. So well did these conversations go that Tsunenaga wasn’t entirely surprised when the Ministry of Rites announced that the Emperor was going to make a big public proclamation at the Gate of Heavenly Peace, where the inner city of Beijing connected with the Forbidden City. As the day advanced, word of mouth brought thousands to witness the ceremony, which was being prepared with pompous decorations and music. Tsunenaga hadn’t been personally invited in any official position at the event, but he couldn’t help thinking it must have to do with his efforts. The Jesuits were suspecting as much; they were already thanking God for having given the Church another Constantine.

After an extended absence from her duties, Xiaobo had finished recovering from her drug-induced illness. She never explained to Tsunenaga why she’d vanished for all those days; even when she hadn’t been able to avoid Lady Zheng’s machinations, she would not give her her victory.

She regretted not having been present during Tsunenaga’s private talks with Taichang; who knew what could have been misunderstood in the passage from Spanish to Portuguese to Chinese. Zheng had disrupted the most crucial part of her plan, which had been precisely to seek a chance to introduce her own variations to the message. The last thing Islam needed was to compete with an official religion that wasn’t itself.

She went to the Gate of Heavenly Peace when the square was already filling with all kinds of curious people, and she thought she’d like to have a word with Tsunenaga before it all started, but she felt a hand on her shoulder and turned to see the Emperor’s sister, Princess Rongchang, dressed in full regalia. The next thing she saw, which threatened to make her insides ill again, was Lady Zheng’s father guarding the princess.

“Good afternoon, Your Highness,” said Xiaobo, attempting to not let her nervousness show in her kowtow.

“I was looking for you, Liang.”

“You were?” She didn’t even know the princess knew she existed.

“I’ve been meaning to thank you personally for the way you saved my brother’s life.”

“It pleases me to serve.” She maintained eye contact to resist the temptation to examine Lady Zheng’s father, whom the princess couldn’t have brought by chance. “Does Your Highness know what the Emperor is going to say today?”

“I’m as clueless as everyone. But, like everyone, I guess it has to do with that Japanese friend of yours.”

“That’s the word around the palace, indeed. But beyond that, I have no idea what’s going on.”

“What exactly has that man been telling my brother?”

“I gather he’s been continuing the work of Jesuits and teaching him his religion.”

The princess frowned. “That’s what I feared. Only days ago, it looked like your friend was going to leave China as soon as he was done with his barbarian magic.”

“Your Highness must have heard that the Emperor himself ordered that he stay in China.”

“Do you think it was a good idea?”

“I wouldn’t presume to judge the Emperor’s decisions.”

Rongchang sighed and adopted a more empathetic tone. “You don’t need to be wary of me. I really need to know what you think.”

Xiaobo looked around meaningfully, and the princess caught her intent. “I suggest we get away from the crowd.”

So the three of them walked toward one side of the square, where they might not hear the announcement as clearly, but they had fewer random ears passing by. It wasn’t enough to make Xiaobo feel any less exposed, so when she spoke, she strived to be careful still. “The Emperor was very impressed with the efficacy of the ambassador’s prayers.”

The princess stopped her, raising a hand. “Now, let’s not fool ourselves. Don’t pretend my brother was saved because your barbarian friend prayed over him. He was saved because you convinced my son to strengthen the vigilance in the palace and keep an eye on the court medic.”

Xiaobo didn’t bother hiding she felt caught off guard. “Does the Emperor see it that way?”

“Who under the heavens has any idea of what my brother thinks? I don’t try to untangle that. It need not be anyone’s concern. What matters is that all threats to my brother have been dealt with.”

The way the princess looked at Xiaobo was clearly meant to convey she knew more than she was saying. “Was there something you wanted to tell me, Your Highness?”

“I know how you saved my brother.” She pointed at her guard and said, “You schemed to have this traitor removed from the palace.” Both he and Xiaobo jumped at those words. The guard looked at the princess, then at Xiaobo, with rising alarm. “It surprised me as much as it did you,” Rongchang continued, now speaking to him, “that you were so suddenly called to serve as my personal bodyguard. The truth is I didn’t ask for you. This eunuch,” she pointed at Xiaobo, “forged my handwriting to have you transferred. That was a clever choice. He had the authority to simply order you to come into my service, but that would have alerted you that the Eastern Bureau was aware of your treachery, as well as your daughter’s.” She waited for him to say anything, but no word came out. She gave an annoyed sigh. “You may leave. I didn’t request your services, and I don’t need them.”

He ran away as fast as he could, and Xiaobo had the momentary impulse to shout for someone to stop him, but the princess waved away her initiative. “How did Your Highness know?”

“My son told me, of course. He couldn’t bear to be part of your plan without alerting me that you were going to make a move in my name.”

“Did you have to tell the traitor that it was my doing?”

The princess saw her concern and grabbed her arms to reassure her. “Two reasons. Firstly, he may be a traitor, but he’s still a soldier. He has the right to know which enemy defeated him.”

“But now that he knows—”

“Secondly, early this morning, my brother signed a decree ordering the execution of the entire Zheng family. Guard, concubine, and pretender.” Xiaobo looked again in the direction Lady Zheng’s father had run, but he was nowhere in sight. “You can stop worrying. They must be arresting him as we speak.”

“Then it’s over,” said Xiaobo with relief. “All of the Emperor’s closest enemies are out of the way.”

“Don’t rush to conclusions. Now we need to discuss more important matters. As I said, you have my gratitude for saving my brother’s life. However, by focusing on one man, your actions have endangered all of China.”

“What do you mean?”

She led Xiaobo to another location farther from the square, almost hidden between two city blocks. “You know that our father never wanted him to rule. A decade was wasted in quarreling with legal scholars over the succession, until tradition, as always, prevailed. The result is that the usual provisions for ensuring a complete political education weren’t made in the case of my brother. He reached adulthood without the extensive preparation that every emperor needs to receive in his youth. He’s no statesman. He’s a drunkard and a lover of prostitutes. He has no discipline, no respect for decorum, and no idea of how to conduct government. That’s the man whom your noble services have kept on the throne of China.”

The echo of the voice of the Minister of Rites interrupted what Xiaobo was going to say, and they both agreed to rejoin the crowd to witness the proclamation.

“Subjects of the Great Ming,” said the minister. “Be it known that the Emperor Taichang has every wish for your prosperity and happiness. Under the generous protection of Heaven, His Majesty watches over his subjects with the loving care of a shepherd.” Xiaobo was certain she’d heard similar language before, and a bad feeling grew inside her about what could come next. “It is Emperor Taichang’s wish that all his subjects strive in blessed harmony to preserve and expand the greatness of the empire, and that all work together with one intention, with one aspiration, with one heart.” She started to feel suspicious at the amount of platitudes that were being spouted before the actual message.

Among the multitude she caught a glimpse of metal and her eyes were drawn toward the sword of Hasekura Tsunenaga, who was attending as an ordinary citizen instead of as the main reason for the celebration. The entire affair started feeling very strange to her. The Emperor’s personal preacher shouldn’t have been left out—if this was going to be a public profession of faith. She looked at the stage once again, growing more confused by the minute.

“The harmony of the empire was broken in the past by the unjust expulsion of the preachers of the Heavenly Lord, who with infinite mercy continues to watch over our Emperor. A first step toward restoration of that harmony was taken with the return of the preachers to the capital city, where they will be permitted to practice and teach their religion with no further restrictions.” Xiaobo heard murmurs of disapproval, but nothing too overt; they stood in the presence of the Emperor. People knew when to appear deferential. “However,” continued the minister, and she knew the hard part had to be next, “not enough reparation has been made to the Heavenly Lord, who wishes that every human being be subjected to the adoration of his only Son.”

This is it, she thought. The empire will turn Christian. This is not at all what I wanted. What did I do wrong?

The Emperor stepped forward and the Minister of Rites, evidently disgusted with what he was being made to do, said in an even louder voice, “All praise the Son of the Heavenly Lord,” while Xiaobo strained to hear both the speech and the complaints in the crowd, “Holy Emperor Taichang!”

A wave of gasps swept over the square. What did he say? Did he just declare himself the Son of God? But that thought was replaced by another, more urgent: Tsunenaga. I must talk to him. She thought he’d lost sight of him, but after dodging the movements of the crowd she found him again, and started to walk in his direction through the hundreds of people who were still trying to comprehend what was being demanded of them. As she got closer, she made the effort to keep the stage within her visual field at all times, to not lose track of what was happening, and saw that Taichang was being invested with a luxurious robe of a style she’d never seen. This can’t be good, she told herself, but I can’t yet think of a way to turn it back. When a crown with complicated moving parts was placed on the Emperor’s head, she finally understood. Its design was crafted to resemble thorns on the outside. Tsunenaga, you fool. You taught him the part about Jesus being lord and king, and of course he thought it had to mean him. At a signal from the minister, the crowd emitted reluctant cheers, and the noise so overwhelmed Xiaobo that she almost didn’t hear the tortured cry in the middle of it.

She looked around, trying to pick the single cry apart from the unanimous roar, and a commotion at the edge of the multitude drew her attention. At first she thought nothing of it; someone must be very displeased with Taichang’s hubris. Then she saw a robed figure and a metallic sparkle, and her heart sank.

“Tsunenaga! Wait!” She tried to reach him before he left the square, but the collective mood was intensifying and it was getting increasingly harder to move. She continued looking ahead, trying to not lose his track, but she was so fed up with trying to walk that she shifted into her fighting stance and resorted to using the gaps between people to move faster. “Tsunenaga! Where are you going?”

After endless effort, she exited the crowd, but he was gone. She tried to think. He doesn’t know the city. Where could he have— Then she ran toward an alley, headed for his house. She had to stop almost immediately, cursing the pain in her feet. They weren’t made for running. “Tsunenaga! What are you doing?” she cried out to no one. Holding back tears, she walked as fast as her broken and rebroken feet allowed, fearing the worst, knowing that every clumsy step put her farther from getting help. She didn’t even know whom she wanted to help anymore; she knew Tsunenaga must be shaken at his failure, but she had also lost much. When she finally arrived at his address, after what seemed like a full hour, she barely had any strength left to open the door and call out his name.

She was late.

In his private chambers lay Hasekura Tsunenaga, dressed in his ceremonial robes, the lower half of his body folded in the traditional sitting position, the upper half bent over with no life. He still held his sword in his hand, and from the middle of his body a torrent of blood was filling the room.

That night, the Eastern Bureau received the news that the king of the Ryūkyūs had died of old age.

Noon, January 27 (Gregorian), 1673

Jiayu Pass

It was a cosmic understatement to say that the Church had entered a state of panic over China. Because the Emperor had never been baptized, it wasn’t exactly a schism, but it was being handled with the seriousness of one. Scholars in Europe had started to lament that it was a new era of pharaohs, of presumptuous tyrants who fancied themselves living gods. A horde of missionaries descended upon the empire following Taichang’s proclamation, and whole monasteries of preachers would have been transplanted there if by the middle of the century the Canutic Empire hadn’t begun to make sea travel mortally dangerous for Catholic ships.

Taichang died in 1647, having consolidated China’s transition toward full theocracy, and was succeeded by his eldest surviving son Youjian, who on the day of his accession to the title of Son of the Heavenly Lord adopted the regnal name Zhenzui, which was an immediate headache for the Jesuits. A regnal name served to define the entire period during which an emperor ruled, and was selected as a harbinger of the ideal of government that he aspired to provide. Zhenzui could be translated as “veritably excellent,” a grandiose exaggeration that, as regnal names went, sounded perfectly normal. However, plaques and signboards in Chinese were written from right to left; to Western eyes, accustomed to reading from left to right, the name could be taken to mean “ultimate truth,” which made it a blasphemous name, an overt defiance to the Pope’s authority to declare what was the correct doctrine. It didn’t escape Xiaobo that under that reading it was blasphemous to two religions, because “the Truest” was one of the holy names of Allah.

Her own name was still, as far as everyone knew, Ma Liang, and under that name she ascended several ranks in the Eastern Bureau, propelled by her own hard work and by Taichang’s grateful remembrance of her service during his time of illness. By the time Emperor Zhenzui was crowned, she had become Chief Eunuch of the Great Ming, and all her efforts were now devoted to tempering her ruler’s claims of divinity. She was on a self-assigned mission to one day restore the primacy of the one true god, although she had come to terms with the unpleasant fact that it would probably take several generations of emperors and as many generations of faithful Muslims in the bureaucracy to steer matters back to normalcy. For the time being, she carefully recruited more and more Hui spies, and waited.

The Church was making its own moves to contain the new heresy, striving to fix Hasekura Tsunenaga’s mistake and teach the Emperor the proper version of the religion. What puzzled them was that, just like his late father, Zhenzui was more than happy to let them keep coming to China, and positively eager to listen to their preaching, but no matter how much they repeated the Pope-approved dogmas, no amount of theology sufficed to lure him away from his own interpretations. Scholars in Rome were at a loss for a strategy that would ensure the salvation of China, and the only thing they seemed able to do was to send a continuous flow of missionaries in the hopes that one of them would be blessed with a solution.

The kingdoms of the recently dissolved Iberian Union were busy keeping their hold on their established colonies, and the mere task of making it to their destination on each trip across the ocean demanded enough of their efforts at a time when every Catholic ship could just disappear for no reason known to them. Of the ships that managed to evade destruction, one had, decades before, carried a Flemish Jesuit in his early thirties who was destined, as had been his superiors and his fellow preachers, to speak for hours until his voice was hoarse and obtain nothing from the unsympathetic ears of the Chinese sovereign. By the time he approached the age of fifty, he had become, as had been his superiors and his fellow preachers, fully disillusioned with the goal of ever convincing that man of his error, and resigned himself to spending his old age doing no more than go through the motions of being a herald of Christ. For the sole purpose of keeping his mind active on something, he had continued to feed the Emperor’s hunger for European learning and European news, as this was a new China, where foreign ideas and especially foreign inventions were now getting a warm welcome, but the most important of his messages, the guiding force of his life, had near to zero prospects of succeeding. His name was Ferdinand Verbiest, and when he was presented with a personal invitation from the Emperor to go on an expedition to the western end of the Great Wall, which the maps revealed to him to lie deep in the middle of nowhere, he feared it would feature yet another parade of cheap curiosities and trinkets.

After merciless middays and freezing midnights on what had once been a busy silk route, their caravan camped within sight of the Great Wall and still no one had explained to Father Verbiest what they were doing there. They had arrived in the early morning and, under specific instructions from the Emperor, selected a certain spot in the desert to set up their tents. Verbiest had seen servants leave Zhenzui’s tent to walk someplace between the nearby hills, and once they even went past the Wall, and as the day progressed and the sun became more intense, he grew impatient.

He visited the Emperor’s tent, only to be rebuked by a team of servants who repeated several times that he had no business entering there. Telling them that he’d been invited didn’t do any good, and he decided to try asking someone else. He’d heard that Chief Eunuch Ma Liang was also accompanying the Emperor on this trip, so he walked under the punishing, cloudless sky the short but tiring distance to the second-largest tent of the caravan.

Even after weeks of traveling together, meeting Xiaobo was still a disconcerting experience. He didn’t know how careful she was to eschew all forms of romance; to him, every time his eyes met with this mysterious being, he felt his vows were in danger.

“Good morning, Father,” she said in Dutch. He, like every missionary in the empire, was required to master a flawless Chinese to avoid repeating Hasekura’s disaster, but she could tell he needed to be put at ease. “Would you like a cup of tea?”

He hated the idea of drinking anything hot with the weather they were enduring, but he’d had enough experiences with dysentery to know to always ask for boiled water, regardless of how uncomfortable it would doubtlessly feel in those circumstances.

As one of the eunuchs traveling in Xiaobo’s retinue poured him a cup, she asked, “To what do I owe this visit?”

“I was hoping you’d know what we came all the way here for.”

She glanced at her servant, weighing the need to signal him to leave them alone, and decided there was no danger. “Does Rome receive news of what goes on along the Silk Road?”

“The Silk Road hasn’t been used in centuries.”

“True, but the countries it passed through still exist. What do you know of them?”

“Very little, in fact. We’ve only learned enough to start suspecting Marco Polo may not have been entirely truthful.”

She laughed at the name. “That’s a woeful degree of ignorance. And if I can get away with admitting openly before a foreigner that we’re not better informed than you are, it’s only because no one else in all this wretched desert can speak Dutch.”

Verbiest looked out and trembled. He could easily imagine all of Europe fitting in that desert. “Why do you bring up those countries?”

“Because what His Majesty is about to reveal to you today is that he’s preparing for war.”

“War? How? There’s been drought and famine in China for years. How’s he going to pay for a war when he can barely deal with a peasant revolt every month?”

“I see you have good sources. Mine tell me he’s hoping for spoils.”

“A war can’t possibly give him enough spoils to feed the whole empire.”

“Then he must be thinking of a bigger war than you are.”

Those words gave him a chilling sensation that he welcomed as a brief respite from the heat in the same thought that rejected it for what it meant. “Just how greedy is that man?”

At that moment, Zhenzui himself, Son of the Heavenly Lord, entered Xiaobo’s tent. Both the Chief Eunuch and the priest jumped to their feet and kowtowed, with Xiaobo adding the sign of the cross that this emperor had made mandatory for greeting him. “Father, you’re here. Good. I didn’t want you to miss what I’m preparing for you. Meet me outside when you finish your tea.”

Verbiest waited for him to leave and said to Xiaobo, “If you’re committing the near-treason of warning me about this, you must already agree with Rome that he has to be stopped.”

The look she gave him crushed his enthusiasm. “Before you advise your superiors to declare war, I would advise you to remember that the Emperor is but one man. He is not China.”

His face managed to blush even redder than it was already. “I wouldn’t think of doing anything against the Chinese people. I just think the Emperor is a dangerous man.”

She shook her head slowly. “I had the same thoughts, long ago. But I’ve seen more than you have. The scope of my maneuvering is limited. Even pressure from your Church has proved insufficient. By this point, I’m counting on God to step in.”

“Then you still have a sense of proper piety. Why do you salute him with the sign of the cross? He’s making a mockery of traditions he doesn’t understand.”

“I do it because everyone has to.”

“If that is so, why do I get to refuse?”

“Your allegiance is assumed, Father. The way he sees it, you’re one of his worshipers; you just don’t know it yet.”

“That damned Hasekura! I pray that hell is giving him a heat like this.”

The mention of the dead ambassador darkened her mood. A lifetime had passed since his short role in Chinese history had ended; she had become a powerful yet powerless old woman, and she hadn’t stopped blaming herself for some of the forces that had pushed him into despair. “I knew ambassador Hasekura. You may have heard that I introduced him to Emperor Taichang.”

“I know about that.”

“If I can be certain of one thing, it’s that he had the best intentions. Are you sure he is in hell?”

“He was taught in our faith. He knew that nothing excuses suicide.”

“Yes, he was Catholic, but he was also Japanese, and he was a nobleman, and he was a father. People can be many things. And the way we know how to deal with life can come from many parts of our personal history.”

“That doesn’t matter. Because of him, millions of people were doomed to idolatry.”

“No. That’s not on Hasekura. And don’t mistake the Emperor’s actions for the heart of the Chinese people. Just because he’s dragging us with him doesn’t mean we’re happy to follow.”

“Even so, we all—”

The blast of an explosion shook the desert. After a wordless exchange of nods to confirm they had indeed heard it, they ran out of the tent to find out what was happening. Atop the hill behind them they saw the Emperor, mounted on a camel and surrounded by a dozen servants. In the other direction, covered by dust, the first watchtower of the Great Wall of China was crumbling down.

Verbiest climbed the hill, muttering curses against the sun and the sand and all the members of the royal House of Zhu, and Xiaobo followed more slowly, the pain in her feet drowned by more pain in her knees and hips and spine. When the Jesuit reached the summit he asked, louder than he meant to, because his ears were still ringing, “What did you do to the tower?”

Beaming with pride, Zhenzui answered from his mount, “A gesture, Father. A tangible sign of an invisible truth.”

Verbiest frowned. That was the official definition of a sacrament. “What is that rubble supposed to represent?”

“The future.” The Emperor nodded at a servant, who dragged a box he regarded with unconcealed contempt, and Verbiest felt pity imagining the effort of pushing that object uphill at noon.

The servant opened the box and Verbiest recognized the device inside. “I made that,” he said to no one in particular. It was a miniature carriage he’d built as a toy to showcase European metallurgic techniques. It was equipped with what the ancient Greeks had called an aeolipile, an enclosed cauldron with a small outlet where the steam pushed against a gear whose rotation was connected to the wheels. When the cauldron was filled with water and heated to the point of boiling, the carriage was able to move without anyone pulling it. “What’s this about, Your Majesty?”

“Last year, you gave me this as a gift. Today, I’m repaying your kindness.” At another signal from him, a banner was raised, and the desert rumbled with the sound of cannon fire. An entire section of the Wall was destroyed, and when Verbiest was able to hear again, his attention was drawn toward the voice of Xiaobo, who was finishing her ascent to the top of the hill and was pointing in a direction he hadn’t looked.

He turned around and the chill of dread returned. Behind the next hill, in a well-coordinated formation, ten thousand copies of his toy advanced toward the Wall. Each of them was the size of an elephant, each of them carrying an impressive cannon, each of them propelled by its own red-hot furnace.

“What is this?” he demanded of the Emperor.

“Your little invention has kept my smiths busy, Father. But I couldn’t have paid them without help from your friends in Copenhagen. Their traders are quite serious about paying us better prices than yours.”

By now Verbiest was finding it hard to breathe, outrage and terror disputing control over his voice. “What is the purpose of this? What are you going to do with those monstrosities?”

“Haven’t you heard? We’ve been fighting the Manchus at the northern border for years. My father appointed very competent generals, but your idea will get rid of the problem for good.”

“This is not the northern border, Your Majesty. You’re not telling me everything.”

“You’re clever, Father. That’s right: this division is marching westward. I’m tearing down this wall, all of it, because China’s no longer going to hide. We will once again expand and conquer.” He pointed beyond the demolished watchtower and added, “That way lie the lands of the Khan. After we take them, we’ll advance to the lands of the Shah.”

“Why? What did they do to you?”

“It’s not their fault,” said Zhenzui with unnerving serenity. “They’re just in the way.”

Verbiest was afraid to ask, but he had to know. “In the way to where?”

The Emperor turned to look at him and smiled with condescension. “You know to where, Father. To my holy city. The true faith won’t be restored until I capture Jerusalem back from the infidels.”

The Jesuit’s eyes filled with tears of rage, and not wishing to bear the sight of that impostor’s face anymore, he stood in horror watching row after row of steel beasts fire at the rest of China’s most famous defense and march through the rubble toward the boundless steppes of Asia.

Part 5: Leap

The impossible has never happened, and the possible should cause no wonder.

Cicero, On Divination

Even one random event would mean that Providence does not completely rule the world.

Saint Augustine, On Eighty-Three Various Questions

Morning, November 14 (Gregorian), 1755

Cádiz

The hall allowed the four men little space around the huge wooden structure in the center. It looked like two ship hulls nailed together, two halves made to face each other in such a way that it wasn’t clear which side was intended to be up. One extreme was entirely made of glass and shaped as a hemisphere, which suggested that was meant to be the front, but the rest of the machine was incomprehensible to the master builders of the Iberian Royal Navy College. It had no masts, no sails, and no obvious waterline; its external design didn’t allow a crew to walk on it, let alone perform any of the ordinary tasks of sailing. But its inside, which had been studied during the process of taking it apart, bringing its pieces into the hall and reassembling it for display there, was quite elaborate: it had half a dozen decks, including one that could accommodate thirty rowers. The technique of its construction was ahead of all the shipbuilding knowledge of Europe, and no one could decipher how it was intended to sail.

The tall, blond sailors captured with it were suspected to be Dutch, which would go a long way toward explaining Dutch maritime supremacy. But so far they had refused to speak.

In the hall where the strange vessel was being displayed, Don Juan Gerbaut y Poruci, holder of the dual office of President of the House of Trade of the Indies and General Intendant of the Royal Navy, looked from his table at the richly tapestried walls and prayed that they would prove sumptuous enough to receive the monarch. He thought his office might have been a more appropriate venue for the occasion, but it had no space for that wooden beast. The surprise and speculation aroused by its discovery had almost quieted the talk of the much graver event that had occurred earlier that month.

On the Day of All Saints, the Iberian peninsula had been hit by an earthquake, and shortly later by a gigantic wave that had swallowed the coast.

Gerbaut looked to his left, where a Frenchman whose presence was due to explicit royal request stood examining a globe encased in glass. Gerbaut recalled him being a mathematician, but didn’t know much more. He had introduced himself as Louis Godin.

To his right was a slightly less explicable presence: a young doctor, more boy than man, by the name of José Celestino Mutis, sent over by the Cádiz College of Surgeons as the only one of their members not too busy resetting broken bones to give their report on the state of rescue operations. He was hunched over another table, reviewing his notes, which he’d done so many times he’d probably memorized them already.

At the opposite side of the hall, studying the far end of the wooden structure, was the Governor of Cádiz, Don Antonio Azlor, who’d had the worst past couple of weeks of them all. The city was in ruins. The reconstruction work could take decades and the Iberian Crown had no money to pay for it. It had become an accepted fact of life that the galleons bringing silver from the Indies could vanish at any time, for no reason.

Gerbaut had the suspicion that the machine he was looking at could be that reason.

His own role in the meeting was clearer: he’d been ordered to gather news from all Iberian possessions affected by the earthquake. His sources had sent him word that even the coast of Ireland had suffered from high waves. The fact that this demonstration of God’s wrath had hurt Catholic nations the most was still fodder for discussion among theologians. But while they worked to ascertain the meaning of this omen, there were still bones to mend and houses to rebuild.

The sound of horses outside made the four of them stand erect, and Gerbaut’s eyes glanced out the window to confirm that it was, in fact, the royal carriage that had arrived, which he signaled to the other men in the room with a quick nod. They stayed immobile for the next ten minutes until a page opened the doors of the chamber and announced that it pleased Her Majesty to regale them with her presence.

Maria Theresa Walburga Amalia Christina of the House of Habsburg, Queen of the Iberian Union, Naples, Sicily, Sardinia, Croatia, Bohemia, Hungary, Galicia and Lodomeria, Archduchess of Austria, Princess of Transylvania, Duchess of Lorraine and Milan, Grand Duchess of Tuscany, Sovereign of the West Indies, Holy Roman Empress and Sanctified Protector of the True and Eternal Faith, paraded her hand around the room for all to kiss as they kneeled, and when formalities were over, she sat at the head of Gerbaut’s table, wordlessly forcing him to find another seat, and began immediately, “How many died?”

Gerbaut knew not to flinch at her atrocious Spanish. “We’ve counted twelve hundred across the entire Andalusian coast. Two hundred died in Cádiz alone. Sixty were counted in Huelva, four hundred in Ayamonte—”

“How is the College of Surgeons doing?”

Doctor Mutis took a while to realize, under her strong accent, that he was being addressed. He showed a blank face until he remembered not to stare too long, and started skimming his notes. “We’ve dispatched surgeons all over the city, but most of the people we’ve found were already dead. Most of them simply drowned, but some were killed by buildings falling on their heads—”

“Is there anything you need?”

Mutis couldn’t conceal his excitement. Rarely did the queen make such an open offer. He started making a list in his head. “We don’t have enough saws for all the amputations we have to perform. Most of the wood in the city was ruined in the flood, so it’s a challenge to make splints to set fractures. People are getting dysentery, we still don’t know why, and we’re struggling to purge as many as we can. But overall, disposing of the dead has given us more work than treating the injured.”

The queen nodded. “Their souls take priority. I’ll send you more priests.” Mutis noticed the indignation that had taken hold of Monsieur Godin’s eyes, but said nothing. She turned back to the Intendant of the Navy. “Other places?”

“Ceuta and Mazagan saw waves as tall as fifteen men,” Gerbaut replied. “The destruction there is comparable to what we’ve seen here, except they don’t have as many buildings as we do, so fewer people died.” He flipped to another page. “The docks at Azores and Madeira were broken to pieces. I’m still waiting for the report from the Canaries, but… Your Majesty knows how ships sailing from there tend to disappear at random.”

“Any news from Portugal?”

“Oh, Algarve was hit hard. The sea broke the fortresses in the coast and swept over the city.”

“How about Lisbon?”

“Let me see… Lisbon… I’m not sure they’re in shape to send messengers yet.”

Monsieur Godin took a step forward. “I just came from Lisbon. It’s been wiped off the map.”

Gerbaut was aghast, both at the unimaginable scale of the disaster if Godin’s words were true, and at his boldness at claiming the queen’s attention when he hadn’t been spoken to. Indeed, Maria Theresa shifted her eyes from Gerbaut to Godin and said, “Go on.”

Godin spoke without notes, with the confidence of one who has seen the facts himself. “As bad as Cádiz appears, Lisbon took it ten times worse. I surveyed the remains of the buildings and interviewed multiple eyewitnesses during the week following the earthquake. All agree that the morning began calmly, with an open sky and no indication that anything unusual should happen. Then the earth started to move, and because it was the Feast of All Saints, most of the locals were attending Mass, which caused most of the first wave of deaths when the temples crumbled down. The earthquake lasted long enough for processions to get organized. Priests all over the city took the Holy Sacrament out to the streets to ward off doom, and still they were crushed by falling buildings.”

“Careful,” said the queen. “You’re getting close to blasphemy.” Gerbaut smiled.

“It was the hand of God that pushed those waves,” said Godin without blinking. “I think He is free to kill as many of his own ministers as He wishes.”

Gerbaut felt the need to interject, “What were you doing in Lisbon in the first place?”

“Her Majesty ordered me to go there. I helped redesign and rebuild Lima when God punished it nine years ago.”

Gerbaut’s face turned red with shame. He silently vowed to not risk another embarrassment.

Godin went on, “After the tremor, many believed they would be safer if they ran to the shoreline, far from the buildings. There they noticed that the sea had retreated an impossible distance, and a mere hour later it returned with gigantic waves that forced them to run back toward the city, but the sea ran faster. Half the city was flattened by the water and the other half was burned because the earthquake toppled candles in all the churches. Those who managed to escape drowning choked in the smoke. Then came another wave, and another. There is no more Lisbon. Nothing remains there.”

“This is worse than Lima,” whispered the queen. “Viceroy Manso gave me an exceedingly high recommendation of your services. Do you think you’ll be able to do something for Lisbon?”

“The whole city will have to be rebuilt. Not that there will be many inhabitants left to make houses for.”

“How many died?” asked Doctor Mutis, hoping not to be too impudent.

“Twelve thousand,” said Godin calmly.

“Just in Lisbon?”

Godin nodded, and Mutis felt his head spinning. He tried to tell himself he shouldn’t be so shocked; he had seen plenty of cadavers at the faculty of medicine, and those in Lisbon were ones he wasn’t even seeing. But twelve thousand in a single city, and by divine decree, was almost too much for one man’s faith.

Mutis struggled to pay attention to the rest of the meeting. At one point it seemed that Gerbaut was arranging with Governor Azlor the repair works on the dock, which should be ready before the next merchant fleet was scheduled to depart for the Indies; but he didn’t hear when the topic of the conversation changed again, and now the queen was asking about the massive structure occupying almost the entire room, as if she had just noticed it.

“When the sea came over the city, it pushed this thing onto the shore,” Azlor was explaining. “Inside it we found several sailors from the north. We think they may be Dutch, but they haven’t spoken.”

“Why haven’t you tortured them?” asked the queen.

Governor Azlor pointed at Mutis. “Because they’re being treated at the Cádiz Hospital, which won’t let us do our job.”

Maria Theresa addressed the young doctor. “Have those men transferred into the Governor’s care. It’s unacceptable that we don’t even know which country they serve.”

Mutis made a show of writing down her order between submissive nods, but swore privately, with the naïve determination of the young, that he’d be tortured himself before yielding his patients.

Paying him no further attention, the queen pointed at the ship. “Can anyone explain what we have here?”

Gerbaut stepped forward. “It is clearly some sort of vessel, but for what purpose, we don’t know. It has one cannon on top, but the exterior of the weapon is disguised as a branchless tree. The rows on the sides of the vessel must be operated from within, but we’re not sure that we have the overall position right—”

The queen stood up. “You say this thing is Dutch?”

“Its crew appear of northern stock, so that’s what we’re assuming, Your Majesty.”

She ran her fingers over the bottom of the hull, shaking her head. “I know this wood. My father made me visit the provinces of our enemies. I’ve seen entire villages made of this.” She turned to the men and declared, “This is Norwegian spruce. You’re pointing your finger at the wrong country.”

Azlor’s mind drew the obvious conclusion. “If the ship is Norwegian…”

Gerbaut was thinking the same. “Then we’ve uncovered the reason for the success of the Canutic Empire.”

The queen turned to face Godin. “I remember your report about Lima.”

“Indeed,” said the Frenchman, “there was talk of strange-looking ships being seen at the coast, but at the time I dismissed them as the baseless rumors to be expected of terrified people.”

“We’ve been sent a message from Heaven,” said the queen, nodding several times as her thoughts ran. “The earthquake in Lima occurred on the feast of Saint Judas Thaddaeus. This one came on the Day of All Saints. We didn’t listen the first time, so God spoke again.”

Mutis wanted to point out that, as long as the Catholic Church insisted on filling the calendar with holy feasts, everything was bound to happen on some saint’s day, but he thought better of it.

Azlor’s voice shook as he asked, “For how long have they been hiding this machine?” He tried to retrace mentally the milestones in the ascent of the Canutic Empire, knowing that everyone in the room was doing the same exercise, afraid to venture a number of years, feeling the seed of anger sprout from fertile speculations.

“Are you suggesting,” asked Gerbaut, “that this is why our ships vanish?”

The young Mutis felt his back dampen with cold sweat. Occasional disappearances of ships had been treated as normal, either as random card shuffles that yielded winners and losers, or else as surprise demonstrations of God’s absolute will, for far longer than he’d lived. He looked around and realized that the same was true of everyone there.

Maria Theresa pressed her hand against the hull more forcefully, feeling frustrated that she couldn’t grasp it in its entirety. “A naval power armed with this kind of ship for at least the past century would have been able to manipulate history according to its pleasure.”

The governor started to pronounce a name he dared not finish. He saw the tremor in the queen’s eyes and knew she’d heard him.

The name was Philip.

At the start of the century, it had briefly been the case that Philip of the House of Bourbon, brother of the king of France, had been offered the Iberian throne, but the thought that France could gain control of the Iberian colonies in addition to its own had mobilized the Protestant nations to another war, this one over the question of the Iberian succession. While the French pretender was en route to Naples to pacify the Kingdom of the Two Sicilies, his ship sank, and the throne went to the other candidate, Charles of the House of Habsburg, Holy Roman Emperor and Maria Theresa’s father.

The implication was an offense of the highest magnitude. The independence of Nova Dania had weakened Denmark’s military influence, which was the reason why initial partition plans for the Iberian Empire during the succession crisis had failed, but the truth of her situation couldn’t be avoided. She only sat on the throne of the Iberian Union because the Canutic Empire had wanted her to, and not by divine decree.

“This is outrageous,” blurted out Gerbaut, regarding the vessel with contempt. “This means the wars of religion never ended. This means the Danish have committed entire generations’ worth of acts of war, one after another, with full impunity.”

“It’s worse,” said the queen. “This is a usurpation of God’s place as arbiter of history. I don’t care how many ships like this they may possess; I will make it the mission of the Iberian Union to destroy the Canutic Empire.”

No one wished to break the silence that followed. The four men knew the Iberian Union had nothing that could oppose this machine. They had no idea how it was made or how it worked, and the queen was still losing ships every month. She could barely hold the reins of her colonies anymore; New Granada and Santiago all but ruled themselves, and with Scotland still occupying Darién, the Peruvian silver supply could easily slip from her hands. Gerbaut felt it was his duty to warn, “To tell Your Majesty the truth, our bellic capabilities seem outmatched.”

“Do you think I don’t know that?” she yelled. “If we don’t have a weapon against this, get me one!” Then she turned to Godin and Mutis, the only learned men within reach and thus suitable targets of her furious decree. “Build it yourselves if you have to, but I don’t want to hear that we’re defenseless against those heretics. By whatever means, we must vanquish the Protestants for the glory of Christ. Now go and find me the weapon that will give us our victory!”

Afternoon, May 12 (Gregorian), 1756

Santos

From Cádiz to Toledo, to search for diaries and old letters; then to Coimbra, to gather testimonies by acquaintances; and then to Rotterdam, to find safe passage to Dutch Brazil: Louis Godin and José Celestino Mutis had embarked on an espionage mission only briefly delayed by the bothersome fact that any trip between Europe and the Indies was safer on a Dutch ship.

After disembarking at the colony port of Mauritsstad, they hired a smaller vessel to take them southward along the coast of the continent, to an island just off the city of São Paulo, called São Vicente. They carried royal letters of introduction to ensure their accommodation at the Carmelite monastery, but they didn’t unpack; as soon as they landed, they started asking around for the house that had belonged to the doctor Francisco Lourenço Rodrigues. Finding it didn’t take them too many hours of wandering. They were received by a young lady who at first didn’t take well to the unexpected visit, but their letters of introduction once again did the trick.

They sat in her living room, voicing their awkward gratitude in careful Spanish. She ordered one of her slaves to serve them cups of coffee with cubes of sugar. “My grandfather’s house is honored by the presence of emissaries from Her Majesty,” she began, and repeated herself, more slowly, so they would understand her Portuguese.

“We count ourselves fortunate,” replied Godin, “that the house still stands. We learned that most of the doctor’s sons joined the clergy and spread all over Christendom. Our assignment would have been much more challenging if we’d had to track down each of them.”

“I can imagine the difficulty. Even my father’s generation is dying out. But I’ll be happy to give any help you need.”

Godin opened a satchel he’d kept close to him at all times during their journey, and leafed through a journal with pictures more valuable than all the sugar in Brazil. “The reason we’re here is to examine some papers that belonged to your uncle Bartolomeu.” He showed her one of the pages, and she turned pensive.

Mutis guessed she was trying to remember which of all her uncles they meant; Doctor Rodrigues had sired a dozen children. “Your uncle,” he explained, “has become a topic of interest to Her Majesty. It was a bit hard to find his place of origin because he adopted the surname Gusmão as an homage to one of his teachers.”

“Oh, I think I know who you’re talking about.” She examined the page again. It had a drawing that resembled a fat goose with eggs in its belly. It didn’t seem familiar to her. “I don’t think I even met him; he must have left for the seminary before I was born. You’ll have to forgive that I have so few memories of him. He died twenty years ago.”

“Twenty-two,” corrected Mutis.

“There you have it: I was a child. What is it that you need from him?”

“We have been told,” replied Godin, “that after his death, his personal belongings were transported back here, to his childhood home. Priests aren’t known for their many possessions, but we’re interested in collecting his writings, and we noticed that some portions were incomplete. We were hoping that at least there could be a notebook among his things.”

She raised her eyes to the ceiling, making a mental map of the house. “Usually, the ships with letters and boxes do reach São Vicente. It’s mostly the ships bound for Europe that sink. But I’ll have to send a slave to check in the upper rooms. Honestly, I don’t often go into the rooms of my dead relatives. It may take a while to identify the right trunk.”

“May we do the searching, if you don’t mind?” asked Mutis.

“I don’t see why not,” replied the woman, to their relief. “You’re here on Queen’s business, after all.”

“Thank you,” said Godin before finishing his coffee. “We can’t reveal the nature of our mission, but you should know that you’re doing a priceless service to the Iberian Empire.”

Night, May 16 (Gregorian), 1756

Santos

Sorting through the chests and boxes piled up in the house took the better part of the week. Some of Father Bartolomeu’s brothers had also been priests and arranged, like him, for their childhood home in Brazil to be the destination of their personal effects.

Godin was amazed that men who lived by the vow of poverty could accumulate so much. “This trip could’ve been avoided,” he said as he relocated a stack of folders. “The drawings could have been sent to a library in Lisbon if the Church hadn’t gone into panic over them.”

“Panic is what Inquisitors are supposed to do,” said Mutis with a tired voice. “We’re besieged by every kind of heretic. You can’t blame the Church for staying vigilant.”

“What do we need vigilance for? The Turks haven’t attacked Christendom in decades.”

Without pausing his search, Mutis replied, “If the Turks have stopped bothering us, it’s only because the Great Ming’s infernal carriages keep them occupied.”

“If we don’t find anything,” said Godin as he lifted his head out of a trunk, “all that zeal will be to blame.”

Mutis closed the notebook he’d just finished browsing, set it aside, and opened the next one. “If we don’t find anything, it’ll be because God didn’t want us to.”

Godin decided to drop that topic, which could only lead to trouble, and said instead, “José, have you seen paper as old as this?”

“Let me see it.” Mutis took it carefully in his hands. “You can barely make out the shape of the sail.”

“I know it’s faded, but do you recognize the etching?”

Mutis nodded. It certainly looked like a structure they had found in Bartolomeu’s notes. “It’s one of the earlier designs he discarded.”

“But the paper itself cannot have been his; it’s at least a century old.”

Mutis turned it around. “Bartolomeu made annotations here. May I have my magnifying glass?”

“As soon as I remember where I left it.” Godin took hesitant steps between old leather bags, broken alchemical instruments, a portable chalkboard, an unrolled map of Portugal, a fish preserved in a jar, a case full of thin glass tubes, several dozen Bibles, and a large, rusty mechanical clock to reach the desk where, earlier that day, Mutis had been examining some dried leaves that had fancied his curiosity. Godin extended his hand from where he stood, toppling an inkwell full of cobwebs, a tiny horse head made of ivory, and a bent candleholder to grab the magnifying glass before returning to where Mutis was sitting.

“Thank you. Let’s see… this portion is definitely Bartolomeu’s handwriting.”

“Does it say anything important?”

“A name: ‘Lana de Terzi.’ I think I saw a mention of this name in Bartolomeu’s notebook.” He put the glass down and gestured at the disorganized room they were in. “Of course, the question of why he wanted to keep this specific page remains open.”

Godin sat on a bed and started fumbling among the items behind him. “We’ve lost entire days in this—” a fit of cough cut his words short. He’d just taken a dusty tome from underneath a pile of discarded clothes.

Mutis waved the dust from this sight and glanced at the cover. “Décadas da Ásia. I know that one.”

“History?”

“Yes. Mostly Portuguese.”

Godin coughed some more before asking, “Is it interesting?”

“It’s very complete, but I wouldn’t lose time in studying it now. Its content is not exactly relevant to our present problem.”

“I dispute that,” said Godin, as he drew a handful of loose sheets from within the book’s cover.

Mutis opened his eyes wide. “Is that…?”

Godin spread the papers on the floor, straightening the wrinkles with care not to break the precious drawings. “Indeed. This is the design he completed.”

Knowing that the question was redundant, but still needing to hear someone voice the answer, Mutis asked, “What’s the queen going to do with it?”

“Build it, of course. And go to war.”

Mutis looked at the machine, which resembled others they’d seen during their research, but this version contained more notes, explanations, measurements, and instructions. “Something so beautiful, turned into a weapon.”

“That’s what’s beautiful about it.”

“I was thinking you’d prefer to use it to get a better view of the sky.”

The idea seemed to please Godin. “That would be useful; I’ll grant that. But this, José,” he pointed at the papers, “is how we’re going to kick the Dutch out of Brazil and the Danish out of the southern tip. This is how we’re going to reconquer the colonies that have declared independence. This is how we’re going to claim the world for Spain.”

Midnight, June 2 (Gregorian), 1756

Atlantic Ocean

Mars had gone below the horizon, but Jupiter was clear and bright, three of its satellites fully visible. At the other side of the sky, Saturn and its crown shone mysterious in the moonless night. With Godin’s telescope, Mutis had tried his hand at the observation of the heavenly bodies, finding them more interesting than he’d expected. They were on a ship bound for Lisbon, relieved that they’d succeeded at finding the information the queen had demanded, but apprehensive about the fact that they weren’t relying on the Dutch to keep them safe this time. On that matter Godin had insisted, and Mutis had, after lengthy discussion, had to admit, that they couldn’t board an enemy ship with the secret they were carrying. They told themselves that they would have to trust that their return was pleasing to God, but after the earthquake, such reassurances were no longer enough. Stargazing had become their main means of distraction from the sense of dread that followed them all the time.

“How many moons does Saturn have?” asked Mutis, as entranced by the halo surrounding the planet as every observer since Galileo.

“Five. But it wouldn’t surprise me if more are found.”

He looked at Jupiter again. “Which moon am I not seeing?”

“Its name is Io. Give it a few hours; it’ll show up.”

Mutis put down the telescope. “How do you even tell them apart?”

The question made Godin chuckle. “How do you tell varicella and variola apart?”

“Oh, they look nothing alike.”

“I wouldn’t know about that. But to me,” said Godin, pointing his finger up, “each of those dots of light might as well have its own face.”

Mutis put the telescope to his eye again. “Well, God may know each star by name, but I only know one. Where’s Polaris?”

“That’s to the north, of course.” Then, seeing what his partner actually meant, he added, “North is that way.” While Mutis changed his position, he took his notebook from his satchel, consulted his calculations for that month, and compared them to the visible constellations. “We’ve already crossed the equator, so Polaris must be visible by now, even more so given that we’re in summer. But it’s going to be very close to the horizon.”

Lowering the telescope to the northern horizon, Mutis searched for the north star, unable to ascertain which of the millions of lights it could be. “All I see is waves.”

“Look for a group of stars arranged like this,” said Godin, holding a lantern over his notebook. “Polaris is the last in this line.”

Mutis nodded and looked again. “I see nothing that looks like that drawing.”

“Tell me what you see.”

“I’m seeing the edge of the sea, and… an entire family of flying fish just jumped.”

“Just now?”

Mutis shrugged. “They must be running from a shark.”

Godin took the telescope, followed the shape of Ursa Minor to its end, almost touching the horizon, and saw, too, the fish jump. “Something is disturbing the fish.” He followed the trail of the fish and saw a piece of driftwood moving slowly.

All he had was starlight to go by, but he was sure he recognized that shape.

“José, point the telescope at the log next to those fish and tell me what you think.”

Mutis obeyed, found the innocent-looking driftwood, and had the same thought. Then he looked at the sea without the telescope and gave up any hope of estimating the distance by himself. “How much time do we have?”

“Minutes, at best. Don’t lose heart, José. This advance notice may make us the first travelers to ward off a submarine attack.”

“What? What do we do?”

Godin loosened the belt of his satchel. “Go to our room. Whatever happens, don’t let these papers leave your sight. Everything depends on this. I’m going to wake up the captain.” He fastened the satchel around Mutis’s shoulder and went off running inside the ship.

Mutis followed the stairs to the lower decks, walked into their room, and sat on his bed. His hands grasped Father Bartolomeu’s work with desperation. He’d grown up on a town of sailors, and believed he still remembered how to swim, but he wasn’t sure he’d be able to stay afloat while carrying a satchel that must stay dry. To his horror, he noticed his mind had started weighing how much more worth his own life was than the papers, and discarded the whole chain of thought.

After another minute, Godin entered the room, looking upset. “The captain won’t believe me. Come with me. You have to tell him what you saw in Cádiz.”

Mutis opened his mouth to ask something, but the entire ship was shaken by a sudden jerk. “They… they’ve started shooting.”

The next cannon ball let in a stream of ocean, and the rest of the night was chaos.

Morning, June 3 (Gregorian), 1756

Saint Peter and Saint Paul Archipelago

Mutis was still hungry, but he couldn’t stand eating another raw crab.

The submarine had pursued their ship relentlessly all night, launching shot after shot until there was no recognizable piece left for salvaging. Holding on to pieces of the hull, the two of them had been carried by the waves to a group of islets frequented by birds, where they had slept for less than an hour until the sun rose and they could take the true measure of their plight. Over the course of the morning, more pieces of the ship had been pushed to the shore. Once it was half a mast. Then it was two tables. Later, a sail wrapped around its own ropes. Every part had been destroyed.

They didn’t see any other survivors. Miraculously, Mutis still had the satchel.

Hopelessness descended over them as they walked around the small island and found it empty of humans. They were thousands of miles from the Brazilian coast, thousands of miles from Africa, and impossibly far from home. They were alone.

Godin knelt by the shore and started picking up what pieces of wreckage he could identify. One wooden spoon landed by his side.

“We’re going to die here,” said Mutis.

Godin shook his head. “No, thank you.”

“It’s true. If the Danish are patrolling this area, any ship that could rescue us will be sunk too.”

“You don’t know that.”

Mutis sat next to him and looked at the sea. “We may get used to the taste of raw crabs. But scurvy will catch up with us eventually.”

Godin threw the spoon at him. “You’re not helping!” Mutis blocked the blow covering his head with the satchel, and Godin gasped. “On second thought, maybe you are.”

Mutis lowered the satchel slowly. “What am I doing now?”

“Give me the satchel.” Mutis obeyed, and Godin started taking sheets of paper out. “The drawings are wet. We need to lay them out to dry.”

“What for? We have no way of taking them to Spain.”

“You’re wrong,” said Godin, suddenly very excited. “We have this.” He showed him one of the pages, blurry but still readable. “And we have that,” and he pointed at all the broken wood around them. “We even have a sail that we can repurpose.”

Seeing his partner’s intention, Mutis stood up. “That’s an absurd idea. We don’t have the tools.”

“We’ll make them. We have everything we need right here. Take these papers to higher ground, where the tide won’t reach them. We are getting out of here, and we are going home.”

Mutis took the sheets of paper and started walking uphill, hoping that the instructions would still make sense, that they would be able to reconstruct the descriptions in the right order, and that they would have enough wood to replicate the majestic bird machine designed by Father Bartolomeu, kept aloft by a fire that provided hot air and a series of cloth balloons positioned to keep it stable.

That was the secret the queen had sent them to dig up from boxes of forgotten notes, which held all her hopes for winning future wars, and which they were going to have to make work if they wanted to survive.

It was the design of a ship that could fly.

Night, August 19 (Gregorian), 1756

Above the Atlantic Ocean

“We could still go higher,” insisted Godin.

“Our firewood has to last the whole journey,” Mutis reminded him. “They’re the same stars anyway; you aren’t going to see them any better.”

With his arms over the handrail and his eyes still aimed at the sky, Godin replied, “I don’t care. I want to go further up, as high as God will let us.”

After the first days of travel, Mutis had learned to temper his fear of heights. From time to time they lowered the flying machine to catch fish, but he was still concerned about the risk of scurvy. “Can we see Saturn tonight?”

“Yes, it’s over there. If I had my telescope with me, I might be able to discover another moon around it.”

“What would you name it?”

“I don’t know. It’d have to be something dramatic, something memorable. For all we know, there could be a myriad of other planets out there that we cannot see because we haven’t flown high enough.”

Mutis thought for a moment. “If any moons are discovered because of a machine like this, the first one should be called Daedalus.”

“It’s a cautious choice,” nodded Godin. “You didn’t pick the name of the son who fell.”

“There will be falls, with enough time. We may think we found the way to outsmart the Danish, but someone will find the way to outsmart us.”

Oblivious to the warning, Godin let his mind fly in the direction of his gaze. “Do you know what kills me about studying the heavens?”

“What?”

“Learning that there are so many places up there and knowing that I’ll never visit them.”

“We’re already making history right here. We’re the first people to fly.”

“Yes, but now that I’ve reached the sky, I want to see what’s beyond it.”

“That didn’t end well for the people of Babel.”

“No, this is different. I can feel it. Right now, there could be an entire Danish fleet beneath us, and if we had any cannon balls to drop on them, they’d have no way of firing back at us. This changes the balance of war forever.”

Mutis kept his eyes pointed up so he wouldn’t see how far they were from the water. “Do you want to watch the sky or do you want to kill Danes?”

“After the queen gives us a welcoming worthy of heroes, she can go and kill as many Danes as she likes. I’m happy up here.”

Mutis forced himself to stare at the ocean and, resisting the immediate bout of vertigo, imagined a different constellation, a row of submarines ready for battle, unaware of the enemy that now rose beyond the reach of their cannons. “Maybe it’s the medic in me, but I can’t find the thought of war joyous.”

“Then don’t think about it.”

“How? War is coming either way. It will devour the world.”

Godin regarded Mutis and saw that his companion was truly disturbed. “It’s not that it doesn’t bother me. I hate carnage as much as you do. But you don’t want to bow to the king of Denmark, do you? Our queen must have this weapon.”

Mutis couldn’t stand to look down anymore. He leveled his eyes with the clouds and breathed. “What will you do when the war erupts?”

“I already serve the queen by training her sailors. You will serve her by healing them.”

“Is that all we are?”

“It’s what we’ll have the chance to be. War doesn’t make people great; it makes them small, so small they can vanish and it doesn’t matter.”

Mutis didn’t know whether it was because the air had grown thin at that height, but he was finding it harder to keep breathing. “In every book of history I’ve read, the wars are the longest chapters.”

“Yes, but the least interesting. Reading about war won’t tell you anything worthwhile about humans. War is what happens when humanity fails, and it always looks the same, with or without wondrous weapons. I’d rather look forward to the time that comes after. That’s when humans show you who they are.”

Part 6: Spread

Open that door, and show us how our world is just like the others.

Giordano Bruno, On the Infinite Universe and Worlds

It has been proved that nonexistent things cannot be affirmed.

Plato, Euthydemus

Afternoon, April 2 (Gregorian), 1917

Mahisūru

A commotion was sweeping the faculty offices. Professor Hiriyanna noticed the concerned murmurs exchanged in corridors, the painfully slow wave that signaled the existence of news to be told and the reluctance to voice it out loud. At each of his classes for that day, he inquired of his students what event of note had occurred, but no one could say. By the time the sun was highest in the sky, his mind had tired of running through the scenarios that over the decades of living in a world war he’d come to consider the likeliest. Above all he feared that the Danish might have made an advance beyond their half of India, a horrific thought for the villages caught in the offensive, but only a small chapter in the long story of the Danish war with Iberia. He berated himself for obsessing over that topic, but he had to admit that for the length of his life there had been no other topic. The war had become all the news there was.

Instead of going directly home at the end of his classes, he decided to stop by his boss’s office and try to get an answer there. Dominican friars had a way of being better informed about the outside world than anyone.

He knocked and was called in. On the chair was, as always, Father Emílio Seijas, the incongruous holder of the position of Dean of Indian Philosophy, busy at the one task he seemed to exist for: sorting papers between the file cabinet and the shredder. In his most private thoughts, Professor Hiriyanna liked to amuse himself with the theory that Father Seijas never left that chair and was cursed to keep sorting papers for eternity as penance for the sins of a former life.

“Good afternoon, Father. What is happening?” he asked in Portuguese. The Dean of Indian Philosophy didn’t speak Kannada.

“Ah, you. Good. I was about to send a letter requesting your presence.”

Hiriyanna cocked his head. “You wanted me?”

Father Seijas copied the gesture and Hiriyanna couldn’t tell whether it was mockery or honest incomprehension. “My last memorandum said it would happen if you didn’t change your habits. When the College Inquisition Board next meets, I hope I can at least tell them you’ve stopped teaching the most unorthodox of your opinions. Seeing you here, I reckoned you’d decided to spare me the trouble of summoning you.”

That remark bounced a few times inside the professor’s head until he recalled the Dean’s memorandum he’d tossed to the trash the previous week. His usual response would have been to make up some meek-sounding promise, but the exasperation he’d accumulated from the worried looks and attempted single syllables he’d heard all day bolstered his animus. “Let them come for me,” he said.

“Pardon me?”

In a stronger tone, Hiriyanna said, “Let them find another scholar who can quote both the Stoics and the Naiyyayikas and point out their areas of convergence. Let them find someone else who can teach the Trinity in perfect harmony with the Trimurti. Let them find someone else who can make Thomas Aquinas dispute with the Charvaka sages. Let them try.” He knew he was being injudicious, but that was one of those days when he had little patience for obtuseness.

Father Seijas examined another sheet of paper and placed it in a drawer. “Today of all days. I guess not all news can be good.”

“What is the news? What happened today?”

“A success,” said the Dominican, seeming to answer the question for the hundredth time that day. “We only received the message this morning, but it happened five weeks ago.”

“What did?” Hiriyanna felt a slight pang of alarm at his own impatience with his boss, but Seijas merely waved a typewritten folio before him.

“My Order obtained a copy of the Royal Bulletin in Manila. The straits were so full of Dutch ships that they had to send it via airship; otherwise we would’ve learned of it last Tuesday.” The Dean saw the question that persisted in the professor’s eyes and proceeded to skim paragraphs from the folio. “To quench your curiosity: the Twenty-Third Division of the Iberian Flying Army captured Copenhagen. The Canutic Emperor surrendered. We won.”

The professor stood for what felt to him like a full minute. “What… what happens now?”

Father Seijas laughed. “What, you ask? Our Lady of Velankanni heard my prayers. The war is over! Iberians have proved stronger than Scandinavians, airships stronger than submarines, Saint Peter stronger than Luther. Everything is now the way it should be. You could say history has been corrected.”

“That doesn’t answer my question.”

Allowing no dent in his excitement, Seijas said, “The next part is obvious. Now we’ll go after the steam carriages, and once we’ve brought all the apostates to their knees, the Holy Lands of the True Cross will be whole again. There will be one Church, as it was in the beginning.”

It was only because his defiance had been spent in the recent outburst that Hiriyanna refrained from demolishing, as easy as it would have been, the Dean’s belief in the inevitable dominance of His Catholic Majesty over the world, but in his head there was a clear summation of what he could have said. He could picture himself going into his home office and unrolling his copy of the Map of the World’s Colonies, one of his proudest secret possessions, issued by the Royal Observatory of Svalbard and smuggled into Iberian India by his friend Hariram, who traded in printed goods. If he weren’t afraid of confiscation by the Customs Inquisition Bureau, he would have liked to make his boss stand before the map and point at the hundred little names and lines highlighting, for example, the presence of no less than eight religions in the continent of Vinland. His point with that exercise, had he been so temerarious as to try it, would have been that Iberians had been in India for over three centuries and their evangelizing mission had failed disastrously. He placed no bets on a single Canutic duchy in Europe turning Catholic.

He voiced none of his thoughts on the matter. But one doubt still bothered him.

“Will the Danes leave India?” Their colonial bases were in the east, somewhat far from Mahisūru, but their submarines scouted with impunity the entire southern coast.

Father Seijas showed him the last page of the bulletin. “That’s for the Pope to decide. Or rather, was. It says here that a meeting was arranged in Rome between the ambassadors of both empires. Since this Royal Bulletin is a month old, the scheduled date corresponds, for us, to last Friday.”

“Do you know what was resolved?”

“Not yet. But the fishermen at Mangaluru have been saying they’re not seeing any more submarines there. My guess is they’ve done a land swap: the Danes surrender India in exchange for, say, Encoberta, which we can reconquer anytime.”

So much for magnanimity, thought the professor. Encoberta, meaning hidden, was an unimaginably huge island, just off New Guinea, recently discovered by Dutch ships pushed southward by the tower-high waves generated by the Krakatau eruption, but seized by the Iberians soon after. It was named after one of the titles of the fabled king Sebastião, who was believed to be waiting at a secret location to one day save Portugal from doom, although, if the outcome of the world war was any indication, he wasn’t going to be needed for another while. The island had received its name because it was the last portion of Earth to be explored, which meant it had been waiting there for centuries until some ship finally happened upon it. However, Hiriyanna had heard reports that the place appeared to have inhabitants of its own, which made him doubt the aptness of the name.

Father Seijas noticed the magnitude of the worry in the professor’s face and gave him a fatherly smile. “You look more troubled than you should be. If you’re looking for permission to breathe easily, you have it. Rejoice. This is a good thing.”

The professor had more to say to that, but once again refrained. Living under Iberian rule made people develop odd coping skills. His was to pretend everything was normal until he was nearly able to believe it. The war had been a persistent but remote notion to him: he’d never seen it, never met anyone who’d been in it. He had no idea how his life was supposed to be any different without it. All he knew to do in the face of any change was to go about his day and do his tiny part in shaping it into normalcy. As a teacher, as a subject of His Catholic Majesty, as a family man, as a perpetual student of every form of wisdom there was to hear, he did not presume to have a hand in the flux of the future.

He looked for something to occupy the minutes until he felt calm again. He graded wrong answers. He read some Mozi in a Latin translation he’d bought from his friend Hariram. He went home.

Rukkamma entered the house in her school uniform and jumped to hug her father. He took her to the kitchen and served her lunch. As they sat to eat the lentil soup and millet dumplings he’d made, she went over the list of prepositions they’d been practicing since the previous week. They’d already been over auxiliary verbs and the formal second person, and he intended to introduce irregular conjugations soon after.

In the evening, his wife Lakshmi returned from work and found them in loud recitation and repetition, and as he served her her meal, she asked, “What is it this time? Portuguese? Catalan?”

“Spanish,” said the professor.

She blew on her spoon to cool it down, and remarked, “You were teaching her Italian last year. Why does she have to study so much so fast?”

“That’s how we’re going to shove the Europeans off our backs: by being smarter than them.”

Her eyebrows jumped up. “Are we Christians now? I didn’t know I’d given birth to the savior of India.”

The professor found the remark only partly funny. Theirs was one of the few Hindu families whose income permitted them to contribute alms to the Church and thus be excused from the mandatory program of the colonial administration whereby a member of the Order of Preachers was lodged in every household of a certain importance. Using the rules of the Church against itself was a skill finely honed in colonies everywhere, but it was a luxury he esteemed too easily taken for granted.

Oblivious to such concerns, Rukkamma smiled at the exchange. “What’s a savior?”

“It’s a Christian idea. Someone who suffers in another’s place,” replied her mother. “Not a wise thing to try if you care about their karma.” She didn’t bother to look, but she knew her husband was, in the interest of domestic harmony, suppressing the impulse to start a theological debate at the dinner table.

Upon examination of his own thoughts, he realized he still hadn’t mentioned the news of the day. Even to him its significance was obscure. His mind lingered on the strangeness of having peace in the world while sensing no difference in his immediate life. All of a sudden, he wondered whether any individual soldier could, in time, be called savior of the Iberian Empire. Certainly many would receive medals for the victory, but was it possible to trace the events back to the actions of one person? It gave him a vertiginous feeling to imagine that the fate of empires could hinge on one human life. History, according to the way writers in both East and West liked to tell it, was indeed tied to the choices of singularly important characters, but he’d overseen enough editions of the Kannada Dictionary of Great Iberians to have a more complicated opinion.

“After you left this morning, we got a letter from your friend in Pune,” said Lakshmi.

He swallowed fast and took a gulp of air to cool his throat down. “Now that’s good news.” For the past year, he’d been in contact with a modest-sized group of teachers who were lobbying colonial authorities to let girls of Muslim families get an elementary education. His own daughter was enrolled in a Catholic school only by effect of his respectable position, aided by his force of personality, but regulations were harsher in the northern provinces of Iberian India. “Where did you put it?”

“I left it in your office.”

“Thank you.”

When dinner was over, the professor announced he’d be spending time with his maps. Lakshmi sent a hard look at Rukkamma, who already knew not to enter her father’s office when that incredibly valuable paper was exposed.

He entered his office, closed the door, opened the bottom shelf of his desk and unrolled his forbidden prize, the Map of the World’s Colonies. As was his habit, his first glance went toward Asia, which was uniformly ruled from Beijing except for the frozen shores at the north, where the Danes kept their dominion by sheer willpower, and the lands of India at the south, a multicolored patchwork of disputed colonial claims.

The way this map chose to depict the world was disheartening to him. Regions within nations were not labeled according to their peoples or their tongues or their natural borders but merely by which empire laid claim to them. Africa, land of a million tribes, was printed in three colors: gold for Iberian possessions, azure for Canutic ones, and gray for those pockets of land that remained unconquered or unreachable.

He remembered his conversation with the Dean and let himself indulge on every retort he would’ve liked to hurl at him. On the Western Hemisphere, every country south of the Bravo river, independent or not, was a happily willing member of the Holy Lands of the True Cross (the salient exception being the Caledonian colony that still controlled the isthmus), but Vinland was more complicated. From north to south, there were the Prairie Confederacy, the Newe-Nuwuvi League, and the Republic of Nuevo México, squeezed between the Viceroyalty of New Spain in the south, Novadania in the north, the Third Californian Empire along the entire west coast (the map didn’t acknowledge the Oregón Free State), and finally, in the east, Royal New France, a huge strip of land that extended all the way from Quebec, bulged around the Great Lakes, and followed down the Mississippi encompassing all of Louisiane. Farther to the east, the coast was dotted with a dozen little colonies, starting in the far north with an oddly-shaped peninsula that had formerly belonged to New France but now was called New Holland, merged for administrative purposes with the nearby New Netherland. Between them, on a spot that the English had once tried to settle, was the curious experiment of Euzkadi Berria, founded by Basque whalers driven out of business by the Canutic fleet at the start of the world war. Then, to the south of New Netherland, was the rather unremarkable Realm of New Sweden, still under the old colonial rule but legally Canutic, and to the south of it lay the Dominion of Virginia, the only place that had been available for the English to flee to after the occupation of their homeland. It was, understandably, on most unfriendly terms with the neighboring New Wales, another Danish-supported venture. Next along the coast, on roughly the same territory as the failed Carolana colony, was the Alliance des Nègres Libres, a network of anarchist communes still figuring themselves out, that had more or less spontaneously split into a Pagan west and a Muslim east, living in an uncomfortable peace with each other and with the Republic of Cuba and the Floridas. The way he saw it, the Iberian king was surrounded by inept advisors if he seriously believed he could bring every last soul in the world to Rome.

Having won his imaginary discussion, he sat down, breathed in several times, and took the thick envelope his wife had left for him. He opened it with joy; those periodic updates from Pune provided him with a much-valued opportunity to keep his Marathi from the rust of disuse, but he also had a vigorous interest in the cause. The movement started by the late Phule family for the education of girls sounded to him like the most natural and necessary thing in the world, but to many traditionalists in both Indian and Iberian culture it was an alien notion not worth discussing. Now the movement was led by a colleague of the Phules, a very old woman by the name of Sagunabai Kshirsagar, who with time had come to rely on Professor Hiriyanna as a point of contact with the academic community and as a guide through the complexities of the Iberian court system.

The letter started with the customary account of bureaucratic obstacles. This time the excuse for not admitting her appeal to the Education Inquisitor and stalling the whole process was that she hadn’t addressed the judge in one of the three official languages of the Iberian peninsula. She was asking for the professor’s help in translating seventeen pages of legal arguments. Then she went on to pretend to share some verses from an ancient poem she claimed to have heard at a recital; it was actually a summarized progress report of the clandestine school the Phules had founded and left to her care. The average post censor would endeavor to learn several Indian languages, but the sheer number of them was beyond any individual’s capacity. By labeling their messages as supposedly an obscure fragment of Prakritic poetry, they were able to convey the most delicate content of their letters in Nihali, a minority language from Sagunabai’s homeland, which Hiriyanna had taught himself in order to hide messages in plain sight. Unlike Marathi, which resembled Hindustani and thus could be deciphered by the censors with some effort, Nihali was unique. It was related to no other language of India, and no one in Europe knew it existed. Sagunabai included such hidden messages often; she used them to ask more technical legal questions and complain about the incongruity of running a school while she waited for the authorization to open it.

The last lines of the coded message described an air of nervous expectation among the Catholic priesthood. The professor lifted his eyes from the letter and counted days in his head, trying to guess whether the northern provinces could have already received the news of the victory. He wasn’t sure which airship routes supplied Pune, but he knew that mail from Rome bound for India would avoid flying over Afghanistan, a kingdom that hadn’t abandoned Islam, but had been turned into a vassal state of China and been forced to install hundreds of long-range anti-aircraft cannons across its deserts.

He put the letter down and looked once more at the world, neatly divided between Christian kings. One third Roman Catholic, one third Lutheran Protestant, one third Heavenly Follower. Areas under the influence of other churches weren’t even visible at that scale, but he’d heard proud missionaries proclaim in their sermons how thousands of small religions across the lands once called the Americas had been wiped out, first by the plague, then by the sword, then by the airship. The frozen north of Asia had suffered equally ferocious proselytizing by the Lutherans. As for the frozen north of Novadania… well, who knew what happened in Novadania? To top the list, the Only Son of Heaven commanded from Beijing the submission of all lands between Japan and Jerusalem, and it always gave the professor a sinister chill to consider that only the Himalayas had prevented the steaming carriages from marching down India, which had enough trouble with the Portuguese and the Danes claiming province after province like two hungry dogs chewing at the same bone.

He found the situation ridiculous; they couldn’t both eat the whole thing. What could the Pope have said about it? Iberia had won, but anyone had to see that crippling Denmark’s dominance too badly would create an opening for China. The professor remembered then that he had been meaning to write a letter to his friend Hariram, asking to be notified as soon as news arrived of the Pope’s decision.

Afternoon, April 11 (Gregorian), 1917

Mahisūru

In those first few days since the announcement of the peace, the professor had so dutifully gone on with his ordinary life, the daily lectures, the three-hour walk to and from the university and the warm homemade suppers that he’d barely kept any awareness that the world outside India had changed irreversibly. To see him stand in his classroom and enjoy the fascination in the faces of youths who were being treated to their first taste of serious thought, and then pause to let his throat rest and contemplate, out the window, the placid stillness of a sky peppered with a rainbow of birds, he could be excused for believing that for the past century the countless dying screams from fields and cities and blood-soaked oceans had been hurled at the impassive throne of heaven from another planet, not this one; from a time so afar that he committed no sin by smiling at the sun.

When he entered his house on that day and saw his wife and his daughter waiting for him, sitting next to someone he didn’t know, he had the disquieting sense that his brief window of comfort had closed.

The guest stood up with difficulty and saluted him with her hands together. “We haven’t met in person, and maybe we should have done so earlier. I am Sagunabai Kshirsagar.”

The professor saluted back. “I don’t understand. What brings you all the way here?”

It was only upon seeing Lakshmi’s hands shaking that he noticed they still held pieces of red chalk.

The door to his office was ajar.

“I’m sorry,” said his wife. “We had to make sure of what she said.”

“What did you need from my office?” Without waiting for a reply, he walked in and saw the Map of the World’s Colonies extended on the floor, marked with circles, lines and numbers. Too upset to say anything more, he returned to the living room and locked his gaze with his daughter’s.

“Rukkamma did nothing,” said Lakshmi. “Your friend has brought terrible news. She sought me at my work, and I just had to rush back here to make sense of it.”

“Sagunabai,” he managed to say in a weak voice, “can you explain?”

The old woman spoke as if the words themselves hurt her lips. “The Pope has issued his ruling. The colonial claims in India will be reorganized.” She handed him a folder of papers and he recognized the typeface as a more recent Royal Bulletin. “One of my assistants stole this from an Inquisitor who’d just landed from Krakow. This contains a transcript from the terms of the Peace of Rome, and I thank the Most Merciful that you pushed me into studying Latin. When I read this, I knew I had to come here myself to warn you. This was too serious to put in a letter.”

He stepped halfway across the door to his office and pointed at the map. “What’s the meaning of this? What’s to happen to India?”

She pointed at the text. “Read it.”

He flipped through the pages until he found the Latin transcript.

On the Iberian side, the reference point for demarcation will be the military garrison at Bombaim. His eyes were drawn toward the circle traced around that point on the map. On the Canutic side, the reference point for demarcation will be the trading post at Madras. He nodded at the other circle they’d made. For the purpose of allocating colonial rights between the interested parties, an imaginary line will be traced between both reference points. Indeed, they’d already done so, several times, making minor adjustments to take into account as much as possible the exact location of both garrison and trading post. He could tell these two women had cared very seriously about getting the procedure right. Then, locate the meridian that crosses this imaginary line at its midpoint. The many uncompleted lines across India showed that that part had been difficult to execute, since the map didn’t include the poles and thus it wasn’t obvious to a casual looker whether its meridians should be taken to be straight or curved; Hariram had explained to him that the map used straight meridians, and that seemed to have been the assumption made in the end.

The lands of the Hindustan lying west of that line shall be under Iberian dominion, and the lands of the Hindustan lying east of that line shall be under Canutic dominion.

Professor Hiriyanna felt his stomach sink.

Not since the days of Aśoka the Great had there been a unified India, and the traders who now held positions on the coasts had been trying, for the past century, to pursue mutually exclusive unification projects. Now, after a century of war between sea and sky, that bulletin announced that Pope Joseph VI, like a less wise Solomon, had swung a reckless sword through the prize most coveted by both contenders.

Trying to steady his hand, seeing already the dreadful result, the professor followed the meridian that passed over the midpoint, followed it from the Himalayas to the ocean. He hadn’t seen the global war that airships had won over submarines, but now he knew more war was coming. Towns caught in the vicinity of that artificial border would see bloodbaths for generations. India would disappear, its halves fed to hungry beasts. And in the middle, like a taxidermist’s incision on a cadaver, ran the line of the Peace of Rome, ignoring the rivers and mountains and roads that made a nation breathe.

His fingers, no longer daring to touch the paper, followed the course of the partition line, south from the one connecting the coasts, until it reached the province of Karnataka and his hometown. The imperceptible dot that represented Mahisūru was obscured by the line. Not to one side or the other: right in the middle. It was a fate worse than being close to the border: the town itself had been split with the nation. His limbs lost their strength and he crumbled down on the map, his limp body ripping it apart in its fall, his tears sliding off his face and onto the broken land of India.

Morning, April 30 (Gregorian), 1917

Mangaluru

When the first wave of despair had abated, professor Hiriyanna found himself in agreement with his family’s sentiment that little would be gained by encouraging all their neighbors to leave Mahisūru. The Peace of Rome had not yet been made publicly known, and the mass panic that was inevitably coming would only spark quicker if entire families were seen fleeing at once. The professor, as well as Lakshmi and Rukkamma, talked in person to a small number of personal friends and advised them to make their departure quiet. They couldn’t rule out the possibility that their friends would spread the word farther, but keeping the truth to themselves felt like the more irresponsible choice.

Quitting their jobs was the easy part. Hiring a carriage to take them to the nearest airship port, Mangaluru, was no issue. Obtaining exit permits for all of them was the deciding step on which everything else hinged. To the professor’s surprise, Sagunabai had made her own arrangements before traveling to Mahisūru and left the school and its litigation in more energetic hands, which meant she was free to go wherever she would end up being allowed to migrate. While waiting in queue at the Imperial Travel Authority to receive an answer to their applications, the professor asked her why she’d taken so bold an initiative. She had a reply at the ready.

“Suppose I make it to Madrid. I can campaign more effectively if I get close to the seat of power.”

“I find that sort of plan premature. We still don’t know which destinations are affordable.”

She sighed and pointed at the stamps on her identity papers. “With the type of imperial subject they categorize me as, I may only travel between Iberian territories anyway. Whatever place I reach will be living with the same problems as far as my work is concerned.”

They reached the front of the queue and the clerk excused himself for a minute to retrieve their files.

Professor Hiriyanna translated his exchange with Sagunabai to his wife, and she said, “I don’t think it’s premature. Have you given any thought to what could be a good destination?”

He nodded. “I’d like for us to try Persia. It’s equally distant from Christians of the Roman, Nordic, and Chinese persuasion. With the Imperial Certification in Languages I got last year, I can claim I aspire to further the Portuguese tongue abroad.”

His wife leaned closer and whispered, “But your degree is in Vedic Sanskrit.”

He whispered back, “That part can go unmentioned.”

They looked around, checking that their conversation hadn’t been picked up by any of the Holy Inspectors who wandered the room. Agents of the Customs Inquisition Office had the authority to randomly search any luggage, and the professor had heard enough stories from Hariram to know what tricks worked. He saw the scene repeat itself all over the queue; one by one, travelers opened their bags and hoped that the Holy Inspector on duty that day would miss the hidden pro-independence pamphlets, the blessed idols, the carefully folded handkerchiefs with prayers to Vishnu in invisible ink. Hariram had declared those measures suicide and volunteered his printing press for a more effective solution. The best strategy to hide the truth was not to conceal it, but to dress it in lies that were more visible. The Church had insisted on making its sacred literature available in Hindustani to assist the Order of the Preachers, and it had been easy for Hariram to produce adulterated copies of those books with entire sections from the Sanskrit classics, which used the same alphabet and were easy to miss in a hurried look. So the professor’s suitcase contained a selection of the finest productions of Indian thought. There was the Sāṁkhya Sūtra split in fragments between Saint Paul’s epistles; the Nyāya Sūtras substituted for the counterarguments in the Summa Theologica; the Vaiśeṣika Sūtra appended after Clement’s Exhortation to the Greeks; the Tarka Sangraha Dipika cleverly pretending to be the footnotes to Tertullian’s refutations of heresy; the Tattvacintāmaṇi blatantly replacing the entire Psalms; the Pramāṇa Samuccaya on every even page of the Acts of the Apostles. The quality of the printing and the speed with which his friend had provided the fraudulent volumes made him suspect that this was a request frequently made of printers, but he preferred not to ask. As added defiance, he’d also brought his copy of the Tirukkuṟaḷ, the Tamil classic of ethics, which he planned to flatly say was Saint Augustine’s Confessions if anyone asked.

To his family he showed a confident face, but he knew he was taking a serious risk. He stood no chance against Customs Inquisition if the true content his books were recognized. But that was the only way of fighting he knew. He was no warrior. He was just a teacher attempting to do the one good thing that circumstances left available for him to do. In his estimations of the future, India was truly going to disappear. What had to be done about it was to preserve its wisdom.

“What if we’re not allowed to go to Persia?” Lakshmi interrupted his thoughts and made him realize they were still waiting for the clerk to return with their travel permits.

“Well… failing that, we… would try our luck somewhere else. From Europe we may cross over into Ottoman lands.”

“What would we do there? I don’t speak Ottoman. Do you?”

“No, to be honest.”

“Perhaps you could find employment at a religious school?”

“I have only the barest acquaintance with Arabic. But I’d be quick to learn. Until then, life would be complicated. But we’ve discussed this. We know things will get harder, but by no means harder than among Christians.”

Sagunabai signaled to get their attention, and they turned to watch the clerk resume his seat.

“I’m sorry I took so long,” the man said in Spanish. “The mail delivered us your applications on different days, so each of them was processed by a separate analyst. I had to dig through the entire archive, but I have your replies here.” He started opening the first folder. “Señora Sagunabai Kshirsagar. Which of you… all right. Your travel permit has been approved.”

She submitted her identity papers and the clerk added several stamps to them. Then she opened her suitcase for a preliminary check, and he gave her a slip to stand in queue in another floor of the building where her luggage would need to pass a more comprehensive review by a Holy Inspector.

“Next is…” He moved the first folder aside and opened another one. “Señor Mahisūru Hiriyanna. Oh.”

“Oh?”

“I’m sorry, Señor. Your application has been denied.”

“What?” blurted the professor. “Does it say why?”

Lakshmi switched her gaze between the two of them, not fully tracking the exchange in Spanish.

The clerk jumped to the last page of notes. “The analyst who processed your case contacted your last place of employment, and they declared under oath that your professional skills were, I quote, irreplaceable. Also, you are listed as having a minor child in Mahisūru.”

“Well, she’s here! She’s traveling with me!”

“I also see a note from the provincial director of the Travel Authority, explicitly forbidding you from leaving India.”

“Where’s the provincial director? May I speak to him?”

“You’d need to go the provincial capital.”

“But that’s Mahisūru, exactly where I don’t want to be! I don’t want to be anywhere in India!”

“I said I’m sorry. It’s beyond anything I can do.” He moved the folder aside, wordlessly marking the issue closed.

“There must be some procedure, some way—”

Lakshmi grabbed his arm and made him look at her. “He doesn’t have the authority to help us,” she said in Kannada.

A touch of finality in her voice pulled him out of his rage. “Where do we go now?” he asked, knowing it was an empty question.

She began a shrug, but was too tired for even a gesture of defeat. “Somewhere else. I don’t know. We’re doing nothing here.”

“Señorita Hiriyanna Rukkamma,” called the clerk. “Your travel permit has been approved.”

All three adults stared at him with alarmed disbelief. “What are you talking about?” asked Lakshmi. Her Spanish was imperfect, but it apparently had done the job.

“Am I going on an airship?” asked Rukkamma.

“Not without us.” Lakshmi snatched the folder from the clerk’s hands. “This has to be a mistake.”

“Let me see,” said the professor. The folder spread precariously taut between his hands and his wife’s, and they failed to agree on which pages to consult, until they gave up trying to make sense of anything, turned to the clerk, and switched back to Spanish. “What does this mean?”

The clerk extended a hand that stayed open until the professor understood the gesture and gave him back the folder. “Let me see… there are no contrary statements from Church authorities, or employers, or family members… no uncollected debts… no criminal history… no dependent offspring—”

“Of course she’s got none of that!” exclaimed the professor. “She’s eleven!”

“She can’t be legally old enough to travel alone,” added Lakshmi.

The clerk opened his mouth and closed it at once. Rukkamma’s parents knew exactly what he’d been about to say. By Indian tradition, Rukkamma was well beyond old enough to marry. It was true that the more affluent families saw less of a need to hurry and marry their daughters, and professor Hiriyanna was absolutely opposed to the practice, but he could see the clerk’s unstated point. Too many girls left India expressly to move in with husbands in Seville or Barcelona they hadn’t even met in person. It was a regrettable custom that the Church didn’t bother to condemn. If her application had been processed separately from her parents’, it stood to reason that certain assumptions had been made about the purpose of her trip.

“We’re all going together,” explained the professor. “You can’t issue travel papers to her and not to us.”

His wife saw an opportunity in the middle of the confusion. “You haven’t checked my folder. Was my application approved? My name is Hiriyanna Lakshmidevamma.” She caught the professor’s dismayed look and whispered in Nihali, “There may yet be a way to save her from the chaos that’s coming if I go with her. You can join us later.”

The proposal made him conjure horrific scenarios in his head. “I can’t let the two of you spend weeks in an airship without me to take care of you.”

“How about three of us?” said Sagunabai. “If we’re all together, we’ll take care of each other, no matter where we go.”

“That’s… actually not a bad idea,” said Lakshmi. “If we plan—”

“Señora Hiriyanna Lakshmidevamma is not authorized to travel,” announced the clerk, drowning the breath of hope she’d briefly enjoyed.

“That does it,” said the professor, turning away to leave the queue. “We’re done here.”

Lakshmi stopped him and asked the clerk, “Can we submit our applications again?”

“Yes, of course.”

“How long would it take?”

“It should take about the same, roughly two weeks. Though I recommend you send all the applications together, so the office can understand your plans.”

Lakshmi made an effort to not claw at his throat. “But that’s what we did. It’s not our fault that the mail separated our envelopes.”

“Then I don’t know what else to tell you.”

“I do,” said Sagunabai. The professor and his wife noticed her again and stood in silence, ignoring the annoyed grunts from the back of the queue. “Just let the girl travel with me.”

“No, that’s not an option,” he protested. “We don’t need to do something so irresponsible.”

“Stop talking in Spanish. What did she say?” asked Lakshmi.

“She wants Rukkamma to go with her,” he translated. “But we’re going to apply again, so we can all travel together. We’ll wait another two weeks and get our permits.” He repeated the same to Sagunabai in Marathi.

“In two weeks,” said Sagunabai, “more people will have the same reasons for wanting to leave, and this queue will be ten times longer. The colonial government will start creating more restrictions for travel permits. Rukkamma’s chance is now.”

The clerk interjected, “Please make up your mind away from the queue and let other people have their turn.”

“This is our turn,” said Rukkamma. The professor made a mental note of pride in her first usage of Spanish.

“Are you saying you want to do this?” he asked. “I mean, Sagunabai is a good friend of mine, but it won’t be the same. We don’t know how long we’re going to be made to wait for another permit; there’s no telling how long we will be separated.”

Lakshmi addressed Sagunabai in Nihali. “Your offer is most generous. I only consent to having my heart broken in this way because I know how much Hiriyanna trusts you. If you can keep my daughter safe, then I beg of you: take her far. There’s more war coming, and I want her out of it.”

“I am humbled. Be assured that I intend to make every effort to protect her. But I must remind you that I can only travel between Iberian colonies.”

“Then go to Japan. Santiago. The Oregón Free State. Get as far as you can.”

Her fierceness stirred the professor’s apprehensions. “Aren’t we rushing with this decision?”

“Sagunabai is right,” said his wife. “There may not be another time for her.”

“Excuse me,” said the clerk. “Either I stamp the señorita’s papers or you need to leave the queue.”

Rukkamma took her papers from her father’s hands, walked to the desk, and presented them.

The clerk made the necessary notes in his ledger. “I’m giving you provisional booking on an airship to Mozambique. Routes via the Philippines are not the safest these days. You’ll be departing tonight, and once you’ve landed, you can decide where you want to go from there.”

“What’s the colonial language in Mozambique?” asked Sagunabai.

The clerk closed his eyes to remember. “The current governor is Catalan, so that’ll be the preferred one. But the locals still use Portuguese.”

Sagunabai nodded. “Rukkamma, can you speak Catalan?”

“I’ll manage.”

Finally, they left the queue and sought a quiet place to calm down. The professor was surprised at the ease with which his wife had jumped to accept Sagunabai’s proposal, and while he could see the sense in that plan, he also felt as if an essential organ were being removed from him. “Rukkamma, take this suitcase. Read the books. That’s the only weapon we have. We must be smarter than them.”

She accepted the suitcase with hesitation. “I know these books are important to you, but if they’re in Sanskrit, I won’t be able to make much use of them.”

“I know, and I’m sorry that we didn’t start with that. I wish we’d had more time. But you’ll have Sagunabai to teach you.”

The old woman smiled. “Professor, we have helped each other in numerous ways for many years. While we await the end of the colony, it will be my pleasure and my honor to take care of Rukkamma.”

Lakshmi embraced her daughter and held her in her gaze, refusing to blink until the image of each was burned in the other’s eyes. “You are a good girl. Be a good woman.”

“I wish,” said the professor, embracing Rukkamma in turn, “that I could make these things not happen. I wish I could make all this not be real. But you know me. I’m a worshiper of truth. I can’t betray it, and I won’t make promises that are easy to say but shall vanish. I wish I could assure you that we’ll meet again. But there is much to do here, and the things I need to do are going to drag me farther from you. What I can give you is this: be loyal to truth. If you do that, I won’t lose you.” He looked with tears at Sagunabai and said, “All our hopes go with you.”

“Don’t be afraid. I spent my young years, and the years that came after, learning to teach girls. This is the thing I’m good at. Rukkamma’s going to make you proud.”

Night, August 10 (Gregorian), 1938

Likasi

Once she was certain that her mother was busy downstairs, Neema ran back to her bedroom, uncovered the pinhole on the wooden box her father had given her on her last birthday, and stood in front of the candleholder with her arms raised in front of her and her hands tied in a shape she’d practiced all week long and which when seen from a certain angle resembled the shape of an elephant. She held her breath and tensed her arms to keep them from making the smallest movement; the most important part of shadow picturing was avoiding a blurred projection. She had trained herself to last an entire minute with her lungs full, but she knew she’d need to stay still for ten times that long to produce a good shadow image. Her father had warned her that Chinese silver paper was very expensive and she must not use it up all at once, but he was away on a work trip, and she was bored.

As her lungs neared their endurance limit, she decided to start releasing tiny puffs of air to relieve the growing urge to breathe again and maintain her posture. Of the many things her mother had taught her, the most vivid in her mind was that problems were solvable for those who learned enough about them, and she’d learned about respiration and gases in her mother’s books. Only last year, she’d learned the word vitálico, the name for the invisible substance in air all living creatures needed. To distract herself from the discomfort that threatened to break her stillness, she tried reciting in her head the lesson she’d memorized that time: first distilled and isolated in China, but reported of in the western world by Iberian Jesuits, vitálico was colorless, odorless, and tasteless. Pure vitálico made oils explode and left scorching marks on wood, but was useful as a remedy for respiratory ailments.

The sound of the front door of the house opening and her mother’s voice distracted her from these recollections, but she managed to not flinch. She let out some more air, careful to not let the movement in her torso extend to her shoulders. There was a cheerful tone in her mother’s conversation, but she resisted the curiosity to see what that was about. She wanted to get this shape right. Not even the unmistakable tearing of gift wrapping was going to ruin her effort. A dozen previous attempts had resulted in unsightly blemishes because she’d sneezed, or she’d gradually slid into slumber, or her hands’ grip on each other had slipped, or a draft from an open window had made the candle flicker, changing the angle of her shadow and thus the borders of her projection. Too many things had to be just right for a proper image to form. It had occurred to her to simply cut a paper in the desired shape and hang it between the candle and the box, but some impulse inside her that she couldn’t name revolted against that easy solution. For her it was important that the extraneous silhouette of an elephant in the middle of an otherwise ordinary picture of her bedroom came from her own hands.

Her lungs couldn’t wait any longer and she finished releasing the rest of her air before taking a badly needed gulp in a less controlled manner than she would have preferred. It seemed to her that her arms hadn’t shifted much, and she decided against trying to overcorrect the movement by making a contrary one that might take her even farther from her original position.

While she was debating with herself whether she ought to declare this attempt failed as the others, someone knocked at her door.

“I’m busy!”

“Neema, open the door. It’s me.”

That voice untied the knot of her hands and drew her running to the door to welcome her father.

“Come here, little one. Did you miss me? Look what I’ve brought for you.”

She felt silly for not having deduced that the lively sounds from downstairs had been his arrival, but the thought vanished from her mind and her eyes opened in delight at the size of the book he was holding. She took it carefully, amazed at its weight. “This book is larger than my face!”

“Let’s hear you read the title.”

She opened the leather cover and found the title page. “It’s in German!”

“It is. Your mother promised me she’d start teaching you some German while I was out. Can you tell me what this book is about?”

She concentrated on the words until they finally came to mind. “It says, Rocks of Germany. It’s a book about rocks.”

“I wish I could’ve found a book about the rocks of Zaire, but it appears few people want to write about us. Maybe you’ll write that book when you’re older.”

“I don’t know how to write a book in German!”

“Then write it in Kiswahili. We could use more books of our own.” He kneeled next to her and pointed at the name under the title. “Look at that mouthful! Imagine that instead of all those weird names, like,” and he read, “Friedrich Wilhelm Heinrich Alexander von Humboldt, this had something closer to home, like Neema Sagunabai Farnana Hiriyanna. Would you like that?”

Her face was one big smile. “How do I write a book?”

“First, read a lot.” He stood up. “I’ll let you have a look at those rocks; I need to tell your mother all about my trip.” Then he noticed the wooden box. “Oh, I’m sorry. I interrupted your shadow puppets.”

She hurried to put the lid back on the pinhole. “It wasn’t going well anyway.”

He put his hand in his pocket and drew out a small black figurine. “Maybe you could take pictures of still objects instead of your hands. That way you wouldn’t get tired.”

“What is that?” The shape in his hand was vaguely human-shaped, but not in a way she recognized.

“This is called a chess queen. The antique shop didn’t have the rest of the set, but I thought you’d find the carving as lovely as I did.”

“It’s pretty.” She took it and admired its relief against the candlelight.

“Make sure you have a look at those rocks; I need to tell your mother all about my trip.” He stood up. “I’m not sure when I’ll be able to get you more silver paper, but I’d love to see what you’ve done.”

Neema hesitated. Her experiments had been less than worthy of display. “May I show you tomorrow? I want to start reading.”

“Of course. Tomorrow.” He walked out of the room and stopped to add, “It’s so good to see you again.”

He went down to the living room, where Rukkamma was already browsing the book he’d brought for her.

“Who made this dictionary?” she asked, trying not to look too dissatisfied.

“The man who sold it to me said it’d been compiled by a Carmelite nun.”

She shook her head. “You know for how long the miners have been asking me for a Portuguese dictionary, but I can’t teach them anything with this; it has too many mistakes. Those Church people should be more careful before they send material like this to the printing shop.”

He sat down and thought for a while before replying, “My next assignment will be in Paris. We’re preparing a big negotiation of land inheritance for a duke’s family. I’m not sure which stores in Paris sell books in Portuguese, but I’ll try my best.”

Rukkamma frowned. “Can French dukes own land in Zaire?”

“This one had papers saying he did.”

“I see. Why haven’t you written papers saying you’re the king of Spain?”

“That’s something I could do. King Paulo the First doesn’t sound so bad. Although the Lawyers’ Inquisition would burn me for fraud.”

She wanted to laugh, but Paulo’s remark made her think of all the friends they’d lost to the ire of the colonial government. She let her silence suffice as a sign of her discomfort.

“How’s the school?” he asked instead, correctly guessing her wish for a change of subject.

“We’ve been studying the properties of light this month. One of the boys designed a curious experiment with slitted screens; we don’t know what to make of it. And my star pupil swears that her new arrangement of lenses has found a tiny planet between Mars and Jupiter.”

Paulo reveled in the pride he felt for his wife. The secret meeting place where she taught the miners’ children had become much more than a school; after she’d finished translating into Kiswahili the treatises of Indian logic her father had entrusted her with, her students had begun pursuing their own interests with a passion that kept her spirits high. Out of sight of the Franciscans, who had come to Zaire to build schools where children learned to count and add, to read the lives of saints and to recite lists of Roman Emperors, Rukkamma was teaching them to construct logical arguments, to gather empirical evidence, to appraise the testimony of dead wise men against new observations, and to constantly question their own assumptions. She hadn’t ceased to learn herself; she’d manage to procure from a Mozambican merchant an Arabic translation of Aristotle’s Organon, which came bundled with an obscure New Organon composed by an Englishman just before the Danish invasion. Paulo had brought her from one of his travels a copy of Galileo’s calculations of motion and acceleration; based on that, a student had designed an improved pulley for the miners, who had been careful to hide from the provincial governor the true origin of the innovation. Another student had put magnifying lenses together and made intriguing observations of minuscule creatures swimming in water; Rukkamma had last heard he planned to turn his contraption to look at plant leaves. There was a girl who claimed to have proved that air had weight, and another who had compiled generations’ worth of data from her parents’ rabbit farm and was working toward the principles that determined whether a new breed would have brown or white fur. Rukkamma herself was making huge progress in her comparison of languages, and had become convinced that Greek and Latin shared an ancient kinship with Sanskrit and Persian. She’d had no success extending the link to the languages spoken in the south of India, but she kept at the task.

No part of her work was known outside her school. For the most part, her neighbors were like Paulo, open to ideas, but her father’s words still echoed in her. She must not allow the Iberians to hear what they were doing. The isolation gave her the peace of mind to keep working undisturbed, but it also meant she had no one to tell her where she’d made an error. She felt as though she were driving a carriage with blind horses.

One reassuring development was that now some of her students’ parents had shown interest in going to her school. She was teaching them the three official imperial languages and in exchange they taught her what was remembered of Zairean history. She’d encouraged them to write what they knew, but their lessons with her were all the free time they had. She kept her adult classes small so as to not draw the Church’s attention; miners were typically believed to be drinking or attending Mass whenever they were not working or sleeping. She knew the time was coming when the children would apply their reasoning skills to Catholic dogma and find it wanting, and she still didn’t know how the town was going to handle the impending decline in Mass attendance. Inevitably she was going to get noticed. But for the time being she just wanted more books, more students, and more chances to push her daughter away from the empire’s influence.

“How about you?” she asked him. “Anything noteworthy?”

“In Zurich I made the acquaintance of our dear bishop’s crafty older brother.”

“Did he give you trouble?”

Paulo paused to listen for Neema’s movements. His involvement with a number of groups that conspired against the everyday abuses of the Iberian Empire was the one part of his travels he preferred not to mention to his daughter. “I showed him the title deeds of the Farmers’ Association, and he showed me a moldy parchment with the seal of the Holy Roman Emperor.”

Rukkamma laughed, careful to not be too loud. “He can’t hope that to be still valid.”

“I know; that thing’s been over for centuries. But imagine the kind of connections a Catholic family must have amassed if it was able to produce a bishop in Canutic territory.”

“What did the judge say?”

“I don’t know yet. I mailed the farmers’ lawsuit to Madrid just before boarding my return flight. He must’ve made his decision by now.”

“You sound like you don’t place much hope in the result.”

“I don’t. The laws of Madrid are conceived to favor the empire on every question. You’ve seen the pleas I send every month against slave raids. Every lawyer I know is doing the same. The fact remains that no authority, either in Zaire or in Spain, is willing to even consider the issue.”

The mention of slavery darkened Rukkamma’s expression.

“What is it?”

She adopted the controlled tone she’d learned to use whenever she felt the topic had become too delicate. “One of the miners was conscripted the day before yesterday.”

“I’m sorry. Did you know him?”

“No. But that shouldn’t matter. I’ve been trying to not let it affect the pace of our work, but everyone in the school is talking about it.”

“What are they saying?”

“Someone convinced the governor that he’d be more profitable elsewhere. I believe he was auctioned this morning.”

“Do you know where they took him?”

“One of my kids heard he’s bound for Peru. Sent to the mines, most likely.”

Paulo said nothing more. There never was anything that could be said.

“He’s just nineteen,” she continued. “If I had known his family, he could’ve been at my school, at least for a couple of years. He could be doing what the rest are doing; he could have turned to chemistry, or algebra, or—”

“That would’ve given him no guarantee against conscription.”

She looked at her husband as if he’d hit her. “Are you saying you don’t believe I’m guarding those children against slavery?”

“What you’re doing matters, but—”

“It was you who showed me the royal decree that ordered a preference for the ‘uncultivated!’ Don’t try to tell me I’m making no difference!”

“As long as you have to work in secret, the difference won’t be visible.”

She stood up, unable to handle more arguing. “It may not be so now. But our freedom has to start somewhere.” Without waiting for a reply, she went upstairs and headed for the main bedroom, past Neema’s door, behind which the candle was out, but a light of another nature was being kindled.

Morning, August 14 (Gregorian), 1938

Likasi

The Church didn’t have resources of its own to monitor everyone’s piety, but families who exerted influence on the community lived under dedicated supervision. While Rukkamma’s activities were kept strictly secret, Paulo’s prominence as an advocate for local land rights made him worthy of interest. Naturally, they were expected at Sunday Mass. Also naturally, Rukkamma had taken pains to instill in her daughter the Hindu ideals of the multiplicity of paths and the universality of the divine. She was sure that the professor wouldn’t have objected to her compromising approach. For her there was nothing to reject in the Catholic mode of worship, but she drew a line between the door to her house and any claim to unchangeable truth.

Every Sunday, once Mass was over, Neema had questions for her mother about matters of religion, which she was careful to always ask in Kannada during the walk back home. Rukkamma did her best to harmonize her parents’ open faith with the empire’s closed one, but sometimes she worried that her answers weren’t sufficiently clear. Since Paulo only had a basic grasp of Kannada, he was unable to assist in those discussions. But even he noticed that this time Neema was uncharacteristically quiet.

“What’s on your mind, little one?”

She looked up at him as they exited the church and asked, in a tone that betrayed how intensely she’d been thinking about the topic, “Has Germany ever owned Zaire?”

He found the question so strange that he took long to formulate an answer. “No. But Germany isn’t a single nation; it’s rather a convenient name for a group of territories that used to have each their own prince and today belong to the king of Denmark. There have been Canutic incursions in parts of Zaire, but they can’t be called German.”

Neema considered his words and asked, “Has Zaire ever owned Germany?”

Paulo laughed, but quickly looked around for government agents. He bent and brought his face close to her ear. “I pray I live to see that day.”

Rukkamma was curious about that line of questioning. “Why do you ask?”

“The book about German rocks has one I’ve seen here. I never thought we could have the same rocks.”

“That’s fascinating,” said Paulo. “Will you show us where you saw this rock?”

“It was when I went to the Franciscan school.”

“That was years ago,” he said. “I’m surprised you even remember that time.”

“It was a strange rock. It was very black, but also very shiny, and I looked at it and didn’t understand how it could be both things.”

Paulo asked Rukkamma, “Do you remember where that school is?”

She shook her head. “Somewhere near the copper mines. The friars wanted to work with the same kids as I.”

“It was near the mines!” screamed Neema. “Yes, Antónia and I were playing in the dirt, and she dug up this pretty shiny black rock, and I told her—”

“Slow down,” said Rukkamma. “Who is Antónia?”

“A girl at that school.”

“Is she at my school now?”

“No, I haven’t seen her there.”

“What happened to the rock?” asked Paulo.

“She kept it. Every time I went to play at her house, I asked her to let me see it, but she never let me touch it.”

“Was it valuable?” asked Rukkamma. “Was it like a diamond?”

“I said it was black.”

“Some diamonds are black.”

“No, this one was different. It had lots of flat surfaces on it and it was attached to a chunk of hardened dirt with little yellow dots all over it—”

“Neema,” interrupted her mother, “if you used to play at her house, we could pay her a visit and ask her to show us the rock, if she still has it. That way you’ll be able to compare it with your book and check whether your memory is correct.”

Neema smiled. “I can take you to her house.”

When they arrived it was almost noon, and they stopped by a coconut vendor to have a drink after the long walk. During that pause, Rukkamma finally recognized the place. It was the neighborhood where the Farnanas had lived as newlyweds, when they had merely a glimpse of their plans for the Zairean people. They had met in Boma, much closer to the coast, and had chosen to settle in Likasi precisely because it was remote and in woeful need. The only thing that had made those years less fearsome and less confusing than they should have felt had been old Sagunabai’s guidance. It was a constant regret of Rukkamma’s that the woman who had finished the job of raising her hadn’t lived to meet her daughter.

They approached the house Neema pointed at, and knocked on the door. They knocked again, several times, until a frail-looking lady opened with what looked like pained effort.

“Good day,” began Paulo. “My name is Paulo Farnana. This is my wife Rukkamma, and you may remember our daughter Neema. She used to be friends with Antónia when they went to the Franciscan school. I know this may sound odd, especially with us showing up suddenly like this, but today Neema was telling us about a pretty black rock they’d found one day, and we were wondering whether Antónia might still have it with her. Neema would very much like to say hello to her old friend.”

The woman stared at them for a while before saying in a weak voice, “This is Neema? By God, you have grown. My—” her words stopped abruptly, and she started sobbing.

“Have we upset you?” asked Rukkamma. “We’re sorry; we should be leaving.”

“No, please. Come in.”

The woman led them inside and they sat in a living room full of pictures made with Chinese silver paper.

“Look! That’s Antónia,” said Neema, pointing at the pictures.

“Those are old,” corrected Rukkamma. “By now she must be as tall as you are.” Immediately she wished she’d said nothing. She lowered her gaze, crushed by infinite shame. Her husband briefly met her gaze and understood, too. Neither of them knew when it would be appropriate to speak again.

The woman took one of the pictures and handed it to Neema. “You can have this one. It gives my heart a little warmth to see that there’s someone who will remember her after me.”

Neema looked at the face on the paper and then at the woman. “Where’s Antónia?”

“Antónia died three years ago.” She saw tears form in Neema’s eyes and hugged her for a long time.

“If I may ask,” said Paulo, “how did it happen?”

The woman let go of Neema and her eyes wandered into the past. “She just got sick. Of what, I never knew. She had headaches that never stopped; she couldn’t sleep. It all lasted less than a year.”

“We’re very sorry,” said Rukkamma. “We didn’t know; we shouldn’t have bothered you.”

“It’s not your fault. Please don’t mind that I’m crying. This is a joyful day for me. Neema, would you like to see her bedroom?”

Neema nodded, and the lady placed her hands on the armrests of her chair to help herself stand up. The movement was very slow and seemed to consume all her energy. With tired steps she took Neema inside.

Rukkamma whispered to Paulo, “She’s got to be half as old as she looks if she had a daughter of Neema’s age.”

“Grief can devastate a mother.”

“You may be right. Still, I’m no medic, but this looks like something more.”

The lady opened the door to Antónia’s bedroom and Neema entered with hesitation. “We played here so many times.”

“I still clean it every day. All her dolls are here.”

Neema felt a surge of excitement that she promptly put under control. “Her favorite was the Queen of Russia. Antónia never let me play with it.”

“It’s the one on the top shelf.”

Neema stood before the collection and allowed herself a sad smile. Of all the elegant dresses worn by Antónia’s dolls, the Queen of Russia boasted the most elaborate, the most dreamlike. She didn’t even know where Russia was, but she was aware that, for a girl raised by Hiriyanna Rukkamma, such a gap had to mean it was some unimportant corner of the world. That only enhanced the mystery of that doll. She’d had the chance to hold in her hands the Queen of France and the Empress of Mexico, but none could rival the favorite’s appeal.

“Your father said you were interested in a rock,” said the woman. “I think I know where it is.” She went to the bed and searched under the mattress. “Here you are.” She took out a solid mass of lustrous black crystal. “She was so happy when she found it. She used to tell me she wanted to save money to hire a gem cutter.”

“Is it a genuine precious stone?”

“What do I know? Once or twice in my lifetime I’ve seen rocks like this lying around the town. I’ve always thought people wouldn’t leave them there if they were worth something.”

“But it’s so pretty.”

“That’s true. Antónia didn’t tire of admiring it.”

“I saw a drawing of a rock like this in a book my father gave me. It’s called Pechblende.”

The woman regarded her with newfound respect. “You have studied about this. Would you like to have the rock?”

Neema wanted to say yes, but was also struggling with an avalanche of feelings she’d never experienced and didn’t know how to deal with. “Is it right for me to have it?”

“I say it is. If this helps you keep the memory of my daughter, then you should have it, as well as her picture.”

Neema’s parents appeared at the doorframe, and she took her leave.

During the walk back home, she didn’t ask any questions. She was enthralled by how a dark material like Pechblende was able to reflect the world around it like a quiet lake under moonlight.

Afternoon, November 2 (Gregorian), 1938

Likasi

“Neema, may I borrow some of your silver paper?”

Neema had mostly stayed in her bedroom since hearing of her former classmate’s death. She had even ceased going to Mass. Her time was spent in reading and, for the first time, writing. One day she’d examine her thoughts in Kikongo and the next day she’d try in Danish. It was very hard because she only knew a few words of each, but her mother had filled her bedroom with a copious choice of dictionaries.

“Neema, are you awake? Please open the door.”

She had never had an interest in poetry. What she had started writing had no name yet, but it felt necessary to her. Everything was poured through her quill: the wars of Vedic gods, the laws of motion, the rivers of Brazil, the moons of Saturn, declensions in Ottoman, the alloys of tin, Canutic dynasties, the burning of Tenochtitlán, the strange animals of Encoberta, the months of the Hebrew calendar, every single lake in Novadania…

“Neema, today we’re teaching the refraction of light. I need some silver paper. Can you open the door?”

For a child raised among books it was easy to develop the sense that the slightest anguish could be alleviated by looking up what had been written on the topic that felt troubling. But she had no books about disease, or death, or melancholy. She was left to decide for herself what she thought about it all.

“Neema, I’d like you to go with me today. The other children miss you.”

When the door opened, Rukkamma noted that her daughter didn’t have an air of childhood anymore. A strand had been woven into her soul, and another had broken.

“How are you? I was starting to worry; we’ve seen little of you lately.”

“I needed to think. It just took me more time than I supposed it would. How many sheets do you need?”

“Just a few. I was hoping you could demonstrate your hand shadows for the class; inverted projections are the main point of this lesson.”

Neema went to her desk and opened the drawer where she kept the silver paper. Her father had brought her a new bundle of it last week, but she hadn’t felt in the mood for playing with hand shadows. “It’s damaged,” she said as soon as she saw it.

“Damaged how?”

Neema showed her mother one of the new sheets. “It has this huge blotch of white in the center. As if it had been exposed to a lamp for hours.”

“Did you?”

Neema pointed at the package. “This is the first time I’ve opened it. I haven’t used it.” She tried another sheet. “All of them look like this.”

“And this paper has stayed in the dark this whole time?”

“Yes, I kept it in here.”

Rukkamma entered the room and had a look inside the drawer. “What else is in here? Neema, if you’ve been leaving candles in—” She saw, under the pile of silver paper, the black rock. She grabbed it and held it in her hand, her head full of questions.

Puzzlement enveloped Neema’s voice. “Did the rock do this?”

“That’s one of the right questions to ask. You’re starting to reason like a natural philosopher.” Rukkamma sat on the bed and began threading one argument after another. “We know silver paper is designed to react to light. Now, this rock has a shiny surface, but I wouldn’t call it bright.” She looked at it closely, with the eerie suspicion that there was more to Pechblende than German geologists knew.

“But still,” said Neema, “it affected the papers. It must shine somehow.”

“You know what’s coming, don’t you?”

She knew it well. “Testing.”

Rukkamma started pacing around the room. “We need two different spaces with a separation in each. We need to place the rock in one closed box that will have silver paper and some normal paper that doesn’t react to light. And we need to have both types of paper in another closed box, without the rock.”

“But you’ve had paper in storage all your life. You already know it doesn’t spontaneously grow a blotch of white.”

“Yes, but with the rock here—you know what? You just made me realize that the presence of the rock might influence the other box. If it produces some new type of light, one that leaves our eyes untouched, that light may be able to bypass solid matter. No, we need a different test. Let’s arrange ten closed boxes in a line, each containing one sheet of silver paper, and place the rock near the first box. I predict that the paper in the other boxes will also burn white, but with less intensity in proportion to their distance from the rock.”

Neema checked in the package. “We’ll have to wait until we have more silver paper.”

“Your father will be busy in Paris until next month.” Rukkamma regretted reminding her of Paris. The priest of their church had asked for their prayers and their contributions because an outbreak of plague was sweeping the kingdom of France. She sat next to Neema and said with the best confidence she could muster, “I want you to trust that your father will be safe.” She took her daughter’s hands in hers. “If I’m to get any personal benefit from the work I’m doing here, it’s that every time my husband sets foot on Europe, he’s the best educated person to be found on that continent, which means he’s able to avoid the plague, because my students figured out how. And if one day the priests who run the plague hospitals in France decide they’re no longer scared of our wicked ways and start listening to us, we’ll be happy to teach them. As for us, while we wait for your father, I want you to study this rock in every manner you can, for as long as you need, until it yields its secrets. But tonight, I have school. I think I can cut the parts of the paper that are still usable. Are you coming with me?”

“Yes.” Neema wanted to add that she hadn’t been aware of how much she’d needed her mother’s strength, but the look between them sufficed.

“Good. Now go and take a bath; you’re not getting out of the house smelling like you haven’t seen the sun in two months.” Rukkamma left the bedroom feeling relieved that some normalcy had returned and wishing fervently that it would last.

The classroom was decorated with mismatched posters collected from Paulo’s business trips. On one end, near the exit, was a diagram of human nerves; next to it were a map of the Zaire river and a table of conic sections. A side wall had a realistic drawing of an orchid from Darién, a list of logarithms, a reproduction of Bartolomeu de Gusmão’s airship design, a charcoal sketch of the moon, and a portrait of Hasan Alhazen. The space on the opposite wall was occupied mainly by windows, which were tinted a dark orange to reduce the notoriety of the building, but the chalkboard at the front of the room was flanked by an aquatint of simian heads and an illustration of the chemical reactions of phosphorus. Rukkamma hoped the children would feel inspired after spending hours surrounded by those tokens of human achievement, but even she had sometimes an uncomfortable sensation of distance. All those artists and sages had lived thousands of miles from Likasi. She had days when it took all her concentration to push away the thought that maybe greatness resembled cereal plants in that it preferred to grow in certain lands over others. Her entire career was built on the refusal to believe that poisonous idea.

That afternoon, the children shared the progress they’d made in their individual projects. For the first couple of hours, Rukkamma passed from desk to desk and examined gear contraptions, double-checked statistical conclusions, helped perform buoyancy measurements. Above all, she was happy that Neema was getting involved again.

“Very well, you’ve made interesting observations, so keep doing that, and you’re going to discover even more. In particular I’d like to bring everyone’s attention to Dikanda’s work; she’s spent an incredible number of hours hunting for frog eggs and describing the growth of tadpoles before they hatch. Dikanda, I’d only comment that your notes make no mention of the first days after egg-laying. I suggest you talk to Masini; he’s built an apparatus for seeing small things that I’m sure will be of great assistance. Now everyone listen: since you’ve shown me what you’ve been working on, before we continue discussing the attributes of light, I’m going to share a little of what I’ve been studying.”

She made a gesture at Neema, who handed her a new rolled-up poster.

“This,” she said as she unrolled it, “is a visual form of representing historical information. It’s called a genealogical tree. This one in particular traces the marriages and offspring of the House of Savoy, but that’s not relevant to what I’m going to explain.” She pointed at one of the first branches at the bottom. “This line splits here. It means that this duke had more than one child. From here on, each child has their own line, which splits when they become adults and start having children. So this type of graphic not only shows the connections between people, but also the passing of time. See how some divisions of the same branch are placed higher than others. That means those births occurred later.”

Once she’d made sure that the students grasped how a genealogical tree worked, she gave the poster back to Neema and started writing on the chalkboard.

“Family relations are a useful metaphor for many other things. You know the three official languages of the Iberian Empire: Portuguese, Spanish, and Catalan.” Then she drew vertical lines under each name. “In a way, these languages are siblings, born from the same branch.” She extended the lines further down and connected them. “What could be called the mother language is what you hear in church: Latin.” Then she stepped to her left and wrote two more names. “French and Italian are also descended from Latin,” she said as she traced their lines, “but they’re less close to the Iberian languages.” She saw a child raise his hand. “Yes, Nuno?”

“If Latin is the mother of Spanish, who is the father?”

She waited for the collective laughter to pass and replied, “If I had to name one, that’d be Arabic. But please don’t tell the Iberians I said that.”

Now she stepped to her right and wrote some names the children had never heard.

“As I’ve told you before, I was born in India. We have our own languages there.” She drew lines under each name. “We have Punjabi, and Gujarati, and Nepali, and Hindustani, and Marathi, and Bengali.” Then she connected all the lines at the bottom. “Actually, we have many, many more, but I want to keep this lesson simple. All these languages are descended from an older one, called Sanskrit.” She wrote the name at the root. “None of this is new knowledge. These connections have been obvious for centuries to anyone who looked at the texts.”

With a smile of pride, she added another set of lines to her tree, one under Latin and one under Sanskrit, and connected them still further down, making a root without a name.

“The part that hasn’t been obvious is this. As I’ve read, and made comparisons, and gathered examples, and discussed with my daughter Rukkamma, we’ve become more and more convinced that there must have been an even more ancient language that spawned these two big families. Yes, María?”

“Did you find a book in that old language?”

“There are no books in that language.”

“Then how do you know you’re right?”

“I don’t. What I’ve done is to propose an explanation. Latin and Sanskrit resemble each other in exactly the way they would if they were cousins. And where there are cousins, there must have been a progenitor. Of course, it would be irresponsible of me to affirm things that don’t exist, but here the clues are so well aligned that they can be followed in a specific direction.” She paused and tried to restate her point. “What I’m teaching you with this is not a fact about literary history, but a fact about the human mind. There’s a difference between inquisition and inquiry. The sole aim of inquisition is to find the same thing you were already sure of, regardless of its truth. But the purpose of inquiry is to follow clues toward things that were already true, even if they weren’t obvious.”

The hour that followed felt less meaningful to her in comparison to what she’d said without planning. She found herself surprisingly unimpressed with the camera obscura they built in the classroom with boards and cloths, and almost forgot to mark on the chalkboard the outline of a shape Neema made with her fingers in perfect imitation of a face seen in profile. At the back of her mind she sensed thoughts running and clashing and she grew impatient for the class to end so she’d have some minutes to figure out what was brewing inside her.

When everyone left, she gave the unused silver paper back to Neema and hung on the wall the beautiful drawings of tadpoles Dikanda had made. She dismounted the camera obscura, rearranged the chairs by the desks, and asked Neema to go out and shake the chalk dust off the rag she used for erasing.

Once she was alone in the classroom, Rukkamma sat on one of the desks and contemplated what she was doing. As a girl, she’d heard her mother’s warnings to her father about veering too close to Church doctrine. She wished there were another way to keep her honesty without putting her students in danger, and she realized she understood now why her father hadn’t stopped. If an entire civilization had turned its back on truth, correcting course was bound to be painful.

She stood up and moved to wipe the chalkboard clean, but the aquatint next to it caught her attention. It was a true work of art, bought by Paulo at a printing shop in Ingria. She approached it slowly, wondering what about it felt so intriguing. It was printed in Finnish, which she couldn’t read, and only a few of the names sounded recognizable to her. Chimpenze. Ingagi. Makaku. Orang-Utang. She had seen some of those creatures in the flesh, but she’d never gotten too close. They could hurt people quite badly. She touched the paper and imagined passing her hand over the fur of those powerful beasts.

Then she noticed she still held a piece of chalk in her hand, and looked for a rag to clean the poster. But when she looked at the image again, a new chain of thoughts was put into motion. She applied the chalk to it again, retouching the smudge she’d made. Just like she’d done before, she drew a line under each simian head and, following habit, made them converge at a root. She liked the way it made sense. Beasts were related too. She thought of horses and donkeys, of lions and tigers. There had to be more branches elsewhere.

Making a mental note to pursue that idea later, she turned toward the exit, but she remembered the chalkboard she’d meant to clean.

There was that shape Neema had made. The human shape.

With well-proportioned forehead, nose, and lips.

Rukkamma blinked.

Her eyes moved toward the poster and back to the outline.

With her heart bloated to the size of her chest, she raised her hand again and drew a vertical line under the human face.

She continued it out of the chalkboard, across the wall, and all the way to the root of the simian family.

She had seen some of those creatures in the flesh. She had noticed their hands, their ears.

It had always been true. It just hadn’t been obvious.

Now that the thought was born, it occurred to her that it ought to have been obvious. Humans who built their cities in other lands, where they never met with a simian, may have had an excuse. But here, mere steps from the jungle, the truth was clear to anyone who looked.

The feeling of one idea pointing the way to another was particularly pleasant for Rukkamma. She leaned against the wall, too excited to trust her own feet, and let the conclusions pile up. What had she told herself a moment ago? There had to be more branches elsewhere. She went back to the root she’d made at the base of the simian tree and extended that line out of the poster, and let her gaze follow the line outward, in the direction of some unknown progenitor lost to time.

Then her gaze fell on the drawings of tadpoles.

She staggered to the drawings and drew a vertical line. Her grip on the chalk was growing unsteady, but she managed to link the line from the tadpoles to the simian one. The suggestion broke every standard she’d believed existed for blasphemy. Out of an ingrained instinct she looked around, hoping there would be no government agents spying at the door. And she noticed the orchid from Darién.

All restraint thrown away, she laughed out loud as she ran around the classroom, tracing a long, winding line on the walls linking the tadpoles to the orchid and, by implication, to the entire family of plants. Once that final connection that unified all of life was made, she wasn’t able to stop: like a child who’s just learned to scrawl, she celebrated by filling the rest of the wall with arabesques, passing the chalk over every poster and every window and completing her dancing route at the other end of the chalkboard.

Which had an illustration of chemical reactions.

She let out a scream and dropped the chalk. Neema opened the door and saw her mother fall to her knees.

“What is it? What happened?”

Rukkamma was unable to speak. She felt an idea the size of a universe forcing its way into her mind. Everything fit together. The pieces made perfect sense. She was overcome with understanding.

“What happened? Talk to me!” Neema asked louder, and had to shake her out of her state.

Rukkamma noticed her daughter and hugged her fiercely.

“Are you all right? You’re scaring me.”

“I’m fine. I’m just… spent. Let’s go home.”

“Aren’t you going to tell me what happened to you?”

“I will. Yes, I will. Not tonight.”

Part 7: Collision

Were it not for the random fluctuations in the motions of elementary particles, no event in the world would ever happen.

Lucretius, On the Nature of Things

When the future depends on conscious will, multiple outcomes are possible.

Aristotle, On Interpretation

Morning, July 2 (Julian), 1985

Munkhaven

For most of Neema’s adult life, convincing representatives from every colonized region of the world to gather in one place and exchange proposals for their liberation had sounded like an impossible dream. When she walked, announced with praises and received with applause, into the austere but spacious hall the Novadanians had built and furnished for that purpose, she silently thanked her father for the extended absences she’d resented as a child. The road to that day had been prepared laboriously, with small, careful moves, every time Paulo Farnana had visited an imperial province, met with each clandestine independence movement, and discussed the idea of an international union. She thanked him for not abandoning the cause during the many years it had taken to build the network of ties that had made that day possible.

The excitement of the reception made her heart strain to beat faster, and she almost fainted as she forced her feet to keep moving toward the center of the stage. She hadn’t yet turned sixty, but she felt half again as old. Despite her lifelong precautions, her work was gradually killing her.

When she reached the podium, she grabbed it to keep herself standing. She searched in her coat pocket and took out her speech. The pallor of her hands distracted her as she unfolded the paper. She closed her eyes to refocus. Her health was not the issue of the day. It didn’t matter next to the bigger problems they were gathered to talk about. She glanced at the sound recorder on the podium, connected to amplifiers all over the room, and smiled. Then she noticed the artificial lights on the ceiling. The sight brought fond memories; it had been her students who had learned to tame lightning a generation before. Of the powerful nations, Novadania had been the most open to the fruits of the Likasi Renaissance, even at the cost of foreign relations. Iberian authorities were livid that there weren’t enough Inquisitors to eliminate the impious profusion of ideas that had spawned from under their noses.

The thought of so much effort ending in vain brought her mind back to her duties. She put on her eyeglasses and started reading, “It is customary to introduce this kind of event by repeating a premade phrase, such as ‘good morning.’ But I cannot say that. None of us can. The reasons that have brought us here are anything but good. Our reasons for meeting here are sad, and horrific, and soul-crushing, and outrageous.”

Her assistant, Gilberto, had deemed that opening too dark for the occasion, which she’d taken as being precisely the endorsement it needed. As the translators spread her words through the audience, she confirmed she was getting the desired effect.

“I am old, but I hadn’t been born when the Peace of Rome was signed. Even my parents were still children. When I talked to people who lived through those times, they told me the same thing: life seemed to have come to a halt. The three great empires no longer faced the problem of butchering each other, and since then they’ve turned their eyes and their whips more intensely on us. Since then, the established world order became ossified. For the better part of this century, history took residence at a horrible place and has refused to move from there.”

The emotion in the audience wasn’t hard to perceive. The pain was intimately known to those present. She was hoping that that moment of sympathy would gain their support for the request she planned to make of them.

“That same paralysis has been forced on us. We don’t rule ourselves. Most of us live in generous lands, but we’re not rich. We’re forced to pray to their faceless god while our sacred places are defiled. Our palaces gather dust, our stories are forgotten, our words are ignored. Kings who don’t even make their own conquests say they own the ground where we’re born and where we die. Our food is confiscated to maintain armies that don’t exist to protect us. Our children are conscripted into slavery with no appeal allowed. The three great empires rest easily, staying inside the same borders the Pope saw fit to grant them, because they think they don’t need to defend them anymore. At least during the war, the freedom of a place like Java or Jamaica was an open question. Nowadays such questions are seen as settled, and therefore our tyrants feel they can make any use of us they wish.”

Now she’d gotten to the part she’d practiced dozens of times. Gilberto had helped her rewrite it, seeking to balance hopefulness with urgency. It was a difficult argument to make.

“The Alliance des Nègres Libres was short-lived, but it inspired us all. Their delegate would be sitting in this room in a place of honor if half a century ago the French hadn’t launched a barbaric operation to reconquer them. But their example has not gone unheard. My father and many others worked in secret for years to create the movement we are part of. It is still fragile; just maintaining communications has been a persistent challenge. If it weren’t for the goodwill of the Novadanian Republic, we wouldn’t even have a safe meeting place. They have shared some of our pain. They, too, fought once to win their freedom. But our situation is different. Novadanian sailors never had to face airships or steel cars. They were almost unaffected by the war, which gave them the chance to experiment and perfect their way of life. Upon landing in Munkhaven, we’ve seen what’s come of it: the people here are healthy, proud, and unafraid. They don’t know hunger. They’re governed without cruelty. And watching them go about their lives it’s inevitable to think it shouldn’t be impossible for the rest of us to have the same freedom. But we need to admit that the world is uninterested in saving us. Even our Novadanian friends. Their political system is the most well-thought-out I’ve encountered anywhere, but they haven’t shown any interest in letting their example illuminate those who subject us. I don’t want to be taken for ungrateful, but a friend with open ears and closed hands is half a friend. In this room I recognize delegates from survivor peoples that exist in Novadanian territory and struggle as much as we do. So let’s not view this conference as a promise of assistance. Assistance is not coming. We only have our own strength, and seeing the size of the group gathered here reassures me that we have the strength we need.”

Neema took a deep breath. She wished her parents were alive to advise her on how to ask hurt people to not hurt back.

“There are many possible ways to reach our liberation. You already know which one worries me. During the year that preceded this conference, the Likasi School of Inquiry submitted to each of your tribal leaders a translated report of my life’s work. It details the physical properties and potential applications of a substance that I’ve isolated from the mineral Pechblende and that I’ve named antonite. It’s a poisonous rock, lethal after prolonged contact, that irradiates a form of invisible energy that can be harnessed for heating. I included an appendix with silvergraphs of Pechblende so that those of you who also find it in your lands and call it by another name can identify it and conduct your own studies on it. I must emphasize that you read my section on safe handling of antonite before you collect it, transport it, or do any tests with it. Moreover, we submitted to your tribal leaders a copy of the theoretical work of my colleague Rodrigo Sánchez, Dean of Natural Philosophy at the Likasi School of Inquiry, who has collaborated with me in my analysis of antonite and has suggested a mathematical explanation that connects the behavior of light with the emission of energy from antonite and extrapolates those phenomena to a more general definition of matter and energy and to a hypothetical relation of equivalence between them.”

She saw that the change of topic confused several of her listeners. She told herself she had to trust they’d see her point.

“I know we’re supposed to exchange testimonies and proposals today, but I’m going to veer away from politics and talk a bit about my work, because I’ve received disturbing letters of reply from some of you. There is indeed, as you so quickly figured out, a feasible technique to multiply the deadly properties of antonite and turn it into a tool of war. Rodrigo and I had glimpsed that implication, but the amount of work required made us dismiss the scenario as impractical. What brings me to stand here today and steal the first speaking slot is that some of you have started talking of pooling together the skills, labor and resources of the Alliance of Survivor Peoples to make this weapon, and I find that idea contrary to the aim of our movement. To even suggest going back to war is unacceptable, and to do so as the very first action we take as a group would insult my parents’ memory and tarnish our cause irreparably. What I shared with you can give us a push toward self-sustenance. I implore you to refrain from using it to pay back hatred for hatred.”

She left the podium and took her seat amid an audience stunned speechless. She knew she’d touched their consciences by the sound of their breathing, which went on irregularly until it was interrupted by the Novadanian host, “The delegate from the Esikongo has finished. Next is the turn of the delegate from the Iñupiat.”

A woman walked to the podium and displayed large maps of areas her people had been forced to leave because heat coming from the Canutic program of perennial burning in northern Asia had reduced the size of frozen lands in Vinland.

“The delegate from the Iñupiat has finished. Next is the turn of the delegate from the Viets.”

An old man missing both hands related a series of massacres perpetrated by the Heavenly Followers Army.

“The delegate from the Viets has finished. Next is the turn of the delegate from the Basques.”

An energetic man described a system of tunnels in the Pyrenees used for hiding suspects of heresy.

“Next is the turn of the delegate from the Tajiks.”

A woman wearing mourning robes cited annual numbers of victims of famine.

“…the delegate from the Aymaras.”

A man who could barely speak between sobs displayed handmade portraits of every member of his family who’d been sold as a slave.

“…the Kurds.”

A man read a series of first-person accounts from provinces that had tried to break free of the Ottoman Empire and whose leaders had gone missing.

“…the Amazulu.”

A man with healed wounds on every visible portion of skin told the tale of how Danish soldiers had forced his village out of their lands.

“…the Sefardim.”

An old lady presented examples of how to answer an Inquisitor without putting oneself or others in danger.

“…the Bengalis.”

“…the Saami.”

“…the Lao.”

“…the Dene.”

“…the Ainu.”

“…the Moken.”

“…the Roma.”

“…the Siksiká.”

“…the Harari.”

“…the Arrernte.”

“…the Kannadigas.”

“…the Yoruba.”

“…the Mayans.”

“…the Guaraní.”

“…the Kazaks.”

“…the Hakka.”

“…the Tapirapé.”

“…the Samoans.”

“…the Ojibwe.”

“…the Bororo.”

“…the Mosuo.”

“…the Chukchis.”

Neema felt a responsibility to not be numbed by the sheer volume of testimonies that kept coming one after another. Volumes could be filled with the barrage of denunciations. A casual listener to that first session of the Alliance of Survivor Peoples could easily conclude that the great powers of the world had convened on abuse and mistreatment as a routine of life. The more Neema heard of what other regions endured, the harder it was for her to stay committed to her stance against collective revenge.

“The delegate from the Chukchis has finished. Speaking slots are complete for the morning and this assembly goes into recess. Meals will be served in the adjoining hall. We’re capable of accommodating halal, sattvika, ahimsa, jhatka, sarbloh, tapu, bigu, zhaijiao, and kosher requirements. Feel free to let your waiter know about your people’s diet. For ease of interaction, seats in the dinner hall are grouped in three zones by working language: Iberian tongues, Nordic tongues, and Chinese tongues. Please do not lose sight of your assigned translator. This assembly will gather again at one in the afternoon.”

Neema waited until Gilberto showed up and helped her to her feet. “Where were you?” she asked him.

“I was just talking to a group of Hutterites. We have their support.”

She nodded with satisfaction. “Those are the easy ones. We have many more to convince.” Her hand grabbed his arm as she started walking toward the dinner hall. “Were the Druze able to come?”

“Things have become complex in that region. I just received news that the Canutic Empire negotiated peace meetings between the Ottomans and the Chinese. Both sides gave up their claims to Jerusalem, and the entire region has been placed under Swedish control.”

“Maybe we’ll be able to bring them next time. Are the Piaroa here?”

“Yes, but I haven’t had a chance to speak to them. I’m sorry. Translators are working a tight schedule.”

“Don’t worry. Take me to eat. Maybe I can get a word with them.”

But before she could look for the delegates she had in mind, she was called by name from a table in the Nordic section. She turned toward the voice and saw a woman walking excitedly in her direction. She introduced herself as the delegate from the Tunumiit, a tribe that lived in the Canutic colony of Greenland, and invited her to join a discussion taking place between representatives of circumpolar communities living under each of the three big empires.

After thinking it over, Neema decided she could use a moment to calm her nerves. She ordered Gilberto to do the rest of the networking they’d planned to do, and agreed to sit at the Nordic table.

“I was telling the gentleman from Kuye,” began the Tunumiu delegate, “about the submarine patrols along the route from Denmark to China. Their observations on their end appear to confirm our own: as the polar ice has melted, Denmark has relied less and less on their favorite weapon.”

The man she was referring to nodded and introduced himself to Neema as the delegate from the Ulta. She sensed the group was midway through a longer exposition. “We’ve been in a lucky position to witness the change. Ever since the spark of the Sinic Heresy, the Great Ming has strived to be perceived as destined to save the world. So, when the war began, they adopted a policy of not suspending trade with their enemies. They wanted to appear as friendly partners even as they sent their steel cars all over Asia. On our island, for example, they built a trading post, both to hide a garrison that would monitor the Iberian colony of Japan and to avoid giving the Danes an excuse to bring their ships all the way to the Chinese mainland. During all this, we stayed in contact with our sister tribe, the Ulch, who live in the mainland. We found ways to exchange news and supplies all through the war. Their revolts against the Danes were to no avail: there was simply no way to stop the burning operation. And those forests still burn! It’s ridiculous. No one can breathe in peace. It’s gotten so bad that now the Danes have taken to the habit of sentencing their petty thieves to man the trade stations along the coast because no one else will work there.”

“All that melted ice must have gone somewhere,” said the Tunumiu.

Neema said, “I imagine in Greenland the effect of losing the glaciers has been more exposed land, but elsewhere we’ve heard of problems on coastal areas. Each hurricane season is more intense than the last. Bombaim gets flooded all the time; so do Alexandria and Cartagena. The entire Sundarban forest is gone. Maybe you’ve never heard the names of Rotterdam or Venice, but they used to be crucial to the European economy. Last night I was reading an internal report about this meeting, and it says that many island tribes in the Pacific weren’t able to appoint delegates to the Alliance because their territories have vanished.”

The Ulta nodded. “When I was a child, my grandparents showed me how far our shoreline used to go.”

“We’ve seen it firsthand,” agreed the Tunumiu. “Without the weight of glaciers, the earth is readjusting. Volcanoes are making Iceland uninhabitable.”

“Well,” said the Ulta, “it took some time, but the Danes got what they wanted: the Arctic has no ice left. And thus they no longer need to navigate beneath it. My family works loading the trading ships that arrive in our island, and we keep the memory of how, year after year, Canutic ships have shifted toward a more conventional shape.”

“I wasn’t aware of a change in ship design,” said Neema. “In the rest of the world, the Canutic Empire still uses submarines.”

“Of course they do. Look at what the Pope did: he let the Danes keep a few of their prewar possessions, but he was smart enough to scatter them in distant corners of the world. So their navy is stretched thin. Did you know they’ve instituted compulsory military service? They didn’t even do that during the war. They need to station patrols around every coast because the colonies can’t assist in each other’s defense. To be honest, the only reason why the Pope didn’t touch the continent at the South Pole was that the Catholics didn’t know it was there, and now it’s where you’ll find the strongest defense perimeter. Submarines are excellent for that job, and with the polar ice gone, they’re no longer needed for trade.”

Another woman weighed in. “I find it interesting how the Danes have taken the example of the Dutch and are trying to present themselves as being primarily a merchant nation.” Neema recognized her from previous conversations. She came from the Tlingits, a tribe living at the northern end of the Californian Empire, their ancient territory badly divided by the Novadanian border. “And they’re turning into aggressive sellers. This year, they lowered the price of their chicken meat below its shipping cost so the Californians wouldn’t buy it from the Prairie Confederacy.”

The Tunumiu woman replied, “They’re jealous of everyone. We live closer to Vinland than to Europe, and still the Danes use their submarines to block all shipments of Novadanian fruit.”

“If I may add to the list,” said the Ulta, “Canutic companies are buying crude oil from Kuye, processing it in their own factories, and selling it back to us as lamp fuel.”

“I see,” said Neema. She was briefly distracted by the odd way the Tunumiu was nodding in rhythm with the Ulta’s sentence, but she went back to her own chain of thought. “The pattern that seems to emerge from this behavior is that the Danes understood they couldn’t dominate the world by arms anymore, so they’ve resorted to snatching the world’s money.”

The Ulta delegate cocked his head in puzzlement. “The Chinese love to trade as much as the Danes, but they hurt themselves with the way they do it.”

“What do you mean?” asked Neema.

“The past couple emperors have been obsessed with moral purity. Clothes have become more and more modest. We can’t buy from India anymore. Everyone knows Indian cloth is the best in the world, but in the Great Ming you can’t find it because garments are stopped at customs and inspected for lewdness.”

The Tunumiu delegate mused, “It doesn’t sound much like a trade problem.”

“Agreed,” continued the Ulta. “It’s more a matter of preserving the old ways. This emperor has been talking about not letting tradition fade since I was little. I heard he just ordered the execution of an entire monastery in Dengfeng because the priest was advising the villagers not to beat their children.”

The Tlingit shook her head. “Was it a monastery of his own religion?”

“There are no others left.”

The Tunumiu woman chuckled. “I wonder at what generation the Emperor started actually believing he was divine.”

“What he believes is all the same to me,” said the Ulta. “I’d let him call himself savior of the world if only he stopped being so harsh on women.”

That sparked Neema’s curiosity. “What’s happening to women in China?”

“Legally, they’re not people. They can’t run their own businesses, they can’t inherit land, they can’t remarry. On the way here, I chatted briefly with the Hui delegate, and he says there’s talk of forbidding girls from reading.”

Neema frowned at that news. “I wonder how the Emperor’s daughters feel about that. Not that he’ll care to hear it, from what you’re telling me, but he must be very insecure about the future of the state if he’s so attached to keeping things in the past.”

The Ulta continued, “This has been going on for longer than people outside China know. My father told me that in his youth a Persian chemist who was working with some Ottoman colleagues had prepared a drug extracted from cow urine that could prevent pregnancy in women.”

The Tlingit’s eyes opened wide. “That would change everything.” Her tone sounded unreal to Neema, but she couldn’t say why. “With such a drug, we could postpone conception until the moment we wanted it. Why haven’t we heard any of this?”

“The Emperor thought the drug threatened the sacred order of the family. So he sent spies to Persia to kill the chemist and burn his notes.”

Neema found the situation horrific. However, the particular interest the Tlingit was showing in the story struck her as odd, even though she couldn’t ascertain from her gestures what it all meant. She thought she might try to get her to talk more. “What did your people think about the documents we sent them?”

“You mean about antonite?”

“Yes.”

The Tlingit took a moment to consider her reply. Neema saw the Tunumiu was just about to open her mouth, but the Tlingit seized the chance to speak first, “Our chief has questions about small-scale applications. Portable antonite generators would be of great help.”

“I’m not sure they can be made that small. Why do you need them?”

The Tunumiu replied, “With the anathema on artificial light, we’ve all had problems trying to build hydraulic generators. They’re not exactly easy to hide.”

“Yes,” conceded Neema, “but California is independent of the Iberian Empire.” Somehow she had the sense she was responding to the wrong argument, as if the Tunumiu had lost track of what topic they were on.

“It’s still a Catholic country,” said the Tlingit, who fell incongruously silent as she searched the next thing to say. “Maritime trade is seeing a reduction in the amount of items destined for household use that are susceptible to improvement from the Likasi Renaissance.” She made another pause. “Censorship reform has caused printing shops to reduce their sales by—”

“I see what you’re doing,” said Neema, pulling her chair away from the table. “You brought me here to make me listen to a staged conversation. You practiced your lines, you knew where to hit, and I fell for it. Even after I made it as clear as I could that I won’t support declaring war, you hoped your words would sway me.” She stared at the three of them, her anger mixed with pity. “Do you believe I don’t know how terrible things are? Those things have happened to my people too.”

The Ulta stood to face her. “Then you should be able to see why we want to kick them out.”

“I want them out too, but not like that.”

“Then how? Antonite is the best chance we have.”

“You don’t know that. I’ve calculated the effect of such a weapon. I can show you my forecasts if you want. It goes beyond any war this world has seen.”

“We’ve made those calculations too. We know exactly what impact it would have.”

“And doesn’t it make you shudder in horror?”

The Ulta hesitated before answering, “I can’t speak for everyone. But life under imperial dominion has taken away my capacity for horror. All I’m capable of feeling is that this way of life has to end, and it’s up to us to make it end.”

Before Neema was able to reply, the Tlingit woman interjected, “We see things the same way you do: history has stopped. We have to shock it back into motion.”

“That is not what I meant.”

The Tlingit insisted, “If we don’t act, our children will know the same suffering.”

“What you’re proposing will cause even more people to suffer. You’re talking of killing whole cities in a blink.”

The Ulta held out his hands. “I’m not here to try to compare between measures of pain; that’s a fruitless discussion.”

“I think it’s exactly the discussion we should be having.”

“Most of us here have already discussed this with our leaders. For the first time, the tactical advantage is on our side.”

Neema started screaming. “Our advantage is our minds! We can use what my school has achieved to prove the Inquisitors wrong, to defy their surveillance, to build! That’s what my family has been working toward for three generations, and I hold it as a sacred legacy!”

“They don’t care what we think is sacred,” he said in a sorrowful tone. “They even kill their own if they find the smallest disagreement. What they did to Hagia Eirene they can do to us at any time.”

Words failed Neema. She knew he had a point. It had been one of the most horrifying episodes of the war. The Chinese had secured control of the Arabian Peninsula and were planning to advance westward. The Ottomans had requested Iberian aid in a joint operation to prevent the capture of Jerusalem. But on the day the steel cars arrived, all airships deserted the battle and headed northward. While Ottoman troops were occupied in the ultimately doomed defense of the holy city, the Iberians carefully positioned themselves above Istanbul to drop bombs on every single Orthodox temple, ending eight hundred years of schism by eradicating the last remainders of the rival faith. The only reply from Madrid to the Sultan’s irate protest was that one heretical nation in control of Jerusalem was as bad as another.

The Tunumiu delegate’s next sentence fell like icy water on Neema’s ears. “Now we have the chance to do the same to them.”

“What?”

“What they have done to our sacred places deserves like retribution.”

“I won’t let that happen,” said Neema, leaving the table and heading for the Iberian section. “Gilberto! Where are you?”

Her assistant ran toward her. “Do you need me?”

“What are people discussing? Please tell me you’ve been able to talk sense into someone.”

“It’s harder than we thought,” he admitted regretfully. “They’ve been holding their own talks before coming here. There’s already a plan for war.”

Neema ran her hands over her face, disappointed at the direction things were moving. “At least we should hold a debate. That’s what we came here to do, isn’t it?”

They heard the amplified voice of the Novadanian host coming from the assembly hall. “All delegates, please remember to retake your seats for the first session of voting.”

“What voting?” whispered Neema. “Gilberto, do you know what’s going on?”

“There isn’t going to be a debate. Every tribe has done that part already. What they’re going to do today is formalize the decision to attack.”

“No, this can’t be,” she pled to no one. It dawned on her that the delegates who’d called her to their table had not aimed at convincing her, but at distracting her while their associates rushed the order of the day. “Help me get onto the stage, Gilberto.”

“I doubt you’ll be allowed to speak again.”

“Let’s see who dares to try and stop me.”

Afternoon, July 2 (Julian), 1985

Munkhaven

The Novadanian host stood to one side of the stage, visibly confused.

“I’ll be the first to agree with you that something is very wrong with the world,” said Neema, struggling to breathe as she approached the end of her forceful plea. “Today we’ve heard a myriad of reasons why. We’re trapped between an empire that wages a fanatical campaign, every bit as ludicrous as it is bloody, against any thought that contradicts its precious faith; another so terrified of living in peace that it lets its military devour its own children and refuses to trade with us as equals; and another that yearns for an ideal of purity so remote that it has lost sight of the real world.” She paused to breathe again. “And then there are the Novadanians, who are so kind, so sympathetic, so eager to lend their shoulder, but won’t raise a finger against our enemies.” The nervous looks between her listeners didn’t escape her. “Does that mean we have the right to degrade ourselves and become killers? Does that—” her voice faltered, she found no more air in her lungs, and Gilberto hurried to escort her down from the stage.

“You shouldn’t exert yourself in this manner.”

She sat and started weeping, furious at herself. “I couldn’t just do nothing. Do you understand?”

“You’ve done more than could be asked of you.”

“People will die, Gilberto.”

“I know. I’m sorry.” He sat next to her and helped her wipe her tears. He was deliberately not checking whether anyone was looking at them.

The host returned to the stage and announced, “A vote has been called for. Delegates will now decide on the question of declaring war against the colonial states and forcing them out with the aid of antonite.”

Gathering the strength she didn’t have, Neema jumped to her feet and proclaimed as loud as she could, “The Esikongo vote against.”

The host nodded and made a mark on a paper. He signaled for the next delegate to speak.

“The Wayuu vote in favor.”

Another. “The Yamanas vote in favor.”

And another. “The Makassar vote in favor.”

The voices started piling up as chains around Neema’s heart.

“The Jingpo vote in favor.”

“The Acehnese vote in favor.”

“The Gwitchin vote in favor.”

“The Meitei vote in favor.”

“The Imazighen vote in favor.”

“The Armenians vote in favor.”

“The Lnu vote in favor.”

“The Chahta vote in favor.”

“The Ewe vote in favor.”

“The Ashanti vote in favor.”

“The Visayans vote in favor.”

“The Sengunthar vote in favor.”

“The Aonikenk vote in favor.”

“The Semai vote against.”

She allowed herself a sigh of brief respite, but didn’t feel capable of hope. In her months-long plea for good sense, she hadn’t seen the need to expend effort in convincing a handful of tribes, like the Semai, who were already known to have a solid tradition of peacefulness and whose negative vote was expected. But it was simply impossible to guess how many of the delegates voting in favor of war were voicing an individual preference as opposed to their leaders’ decision. The Esikongo didn’t have any particular pacifist tradition, but as long as she happened to be the one representing them, the Esikongo would vote against war a million times. As for the rest, she understood why they were doing it. Their pain was her pain. She’d talked to many of them for years; she knew, despite their profound disagreement, that they were being sincere. Everyone had endured enough. They’d finally seen a way out and were clinging to it.

“The Namaqua vote in favor.”

“The Bateq vote against.”

“The Sefwi vote in favor.”

“The Erzyans vote in favor.”

“The Dslala vote in favor.”

“The Aong vote in favor.”

“The Minahasans vote in favor.”

“The Shoshone vote in favor.”

“The Yanomami vote in favor.”

“The Palawa vote in favor.”

“The Baining vote in favor.”

“The Makhuwa vote in favor.”

“The Wolof vote in favor.”

“The Ingush vote in favor.”

“The Bariba vote in favor.”

“The Qaraqalpaqs vote in favor.”

Neema had expected a larger proportion of negative votes, and wondered how many of the delegates were changing their mind at the last second to not contradict the rest. War in the abstract was a deceptively simple thought, but she knew that the technical details of her report needed a baseline of specific knowledge and effort to be fully understood. She’d even received letters from a few tribes who held a more mystical view of the weapon and took it for a miraculous remaker of the world. It might well turn out to be so, but she wished she’d had more time to dispel that belief. By her side she heard Gilberto had started to cry as well.

“The Dule vote in favor.”

“The Igbo vote in favor.”

“The Agikuyu vote in favor.”

“The Hazaras vote in favor.”

“The Misak vote in favor.”

“The Yamato vote in favor.”

“The Huiliche vote in favor.”

“The Paiwan vote in favor.”

“The Albaamaha vote in favor.”

“The Tchamba vote in favor.”

“The Dayaks vote in favor.”

“The Fon vote in favor.”

“The Mandinka vote in favor.”

Her hands trembled as they kept removing tears. She’d lost count of the votes; it must have reached the hundreds. She felt small in the presence of so much hate. Then one part of her mind pointed out that there was a difference between hate and hate. If you were being whipped and you screamed to make it stop, no one could fault you for being loud. But another part of her mind insisted that there was no righteous way to kill thousands.

More votes kept coming and she covered her ears, to quieten both the room and her internal discussion. She wasn’t going to resolve it in one sitting. What could be affirmed for certain, what she was privately screaming at herself to sustain a spark of hope, was that one vote on one issue provided a minuscule amount of information on the general character of a people. As evil as she found the plan, she decided not to hate them. They were wounded. They were tired. For the world to be restored to any semblance of health, the empires had to die. Still, she desperately asked herself whether she could have come up with an alternative. She thought, if the attack succeeded and the empires fell, that she’d be able to live in the resulting world, but she doubted she’d be able to live with not having thought of something else to suggest.

This was the way things were going to be, and she stopped crying as soon as she accepted it. Her mind closed the door to questions of other routes history might have taken. This time, injustice would be met with force. And thus the voices continued, each answering all—each of them inevitable.

“The Moriori vote against.”

“The Tsitsistas vote in favor.”

“The Ovimbundu vote in favor.”

“The Otomi vote in favor.”

“The Rejang vote in favor.”

“The Ayoreo vote in favor.”

“The Batswana vote in favor.”

“The Witotos vote in favor.”

“The Enets vote in favor.”

“The Wolastoqiyik vote in favor.”

“The Cabécar vote in favor.”

“The Tujia vote in favor.”

“The Sambals vote in favor.”

“The Wolaytta vote in favor.”

“The Lakota vote in favor.”

“The Bamana vote in favor.”

“The Kanienkehaka vote in favor.”

“The Buryats vote in favor.”

“The Ngasanans vote in favor.”

“The Hmong vote in favor.”

“The Orochen vote in favor.”

“The Ifugaos vote in favor.”

“The Bunun vote in favor.”

“The Dharug vote in favor.”

“The Ovambo vote in favor.”

“The Selknam vote in favor.”

Morning, August 17 (Julian), 1999

Namib Desert

The effects of the vote were not immediate. Whereas each of the big empires had developed its signature weapon unimpeded, the Alliance of Survivor Peoples had needed to conduct its research in hiding while its members continued to live under an odious yoke.

Completing their study of fissile matter until a prototype was ready for demonstration had taken more years than Neema Farnana had had left.

In the eyes of Yakub ben Jekuthiel Nahari, the newly appointed delegate from the Teimanim, in those years the world had finally started to move away from its stagnation, but it was taking a heated route. Danish India had issued a declaration that only formalized what had for long been a gainless war with Iberian India. Northwest from there, seeking to avoid a prolonged siege and the ruin it would cause, the tiny kingdom of Russia had petitioned to join the Great Ming, leaving Lithuanian Catholics unprotected and creating for the first time an open route from the dominions of the Heavenly Followers and the Holy Lands of the True Cross. Meanwhile, Denmark had expressed support for a twofold plan to build a canal through the Swedish Protectorate of Sinai and another through Scottish Darién; in response, the king of Iberia had reminded the Danes that he owned colonies next to both regions and he would not tolerate the unfair disadvantage posed by the creation of artificial trade routes. The fact that Iberian trade was conducted by air didn’t seem to weigh in the discussion. At the other side of the world, Encoberta’s indigenous peoples had started an independence campaign that the Spanish viceroy was handling with the accustomed brutality. Novadania had started charging Canutic ships a toll for crossing the Munk Strait between the Arctic and the Pacific; since the former colony had submarines of its own to enforce payment, the situation had at first turned to its favor, but Yakub had been informed that the Novadanian Senate expected Denmark to switch back to its previous ship designs and escalate the disagreement to a full-scale submarine war. Worst of all, oil deposits had been found in Arabia, much more than Persia could offer for fueling the Chinese steel army. A quick scheme of bribes had shifted the Arabian princes’ allegiance from Istanbul to Beijing, after which the fall of the Ottoman Empire to the Great Ming was only a matter of time. For Yakub the question facing the survivor peoples was no longer whether to bring war back to the empires, but whether to stop them from igniting the world again.

While preparations for the bomb test were being finished, Yakub waited in his tent for Gilberto and his entourage to join him and the team of builders camping with him. Because the agreement signed with regard to the demonstration stipulated that each side in the voting should be represented, Gilberto would be bringing a few other observers smuggled into Zaire by various routes. All the duties of the delegate from the Esikongo had been passed from Neema to Gilberto years before her death, but in subsequent Alliance meetings many said they could still detect her impassionate pleas against war in her successor’s voice. Yakub didn’t share that recollection; he was a novice practitioner in the still incomplete art of international diplomacy. His predecessor had voted in favor of attacking, and had in fact hurried to convince several undecided delegates to support what had in a matter of minutes become the majority position. Other members of the Alliance were very little informed, or concerned, about the living conditions of the Teimanim, but Yakub knew that the likelihood of Ottoman possessions passing into Chinese hands was everyone’s business.

On the Monday that the Canutic colonial authorities in Namib counted as the 17th of the month and their Portuguese neighbors in Angola counted as the 30th, Yakub saw the approaching shape of the camel caravan that brought Gilberto and his travel companions to the test site. The quickly rising heat of the morning made Yakub tremble with the question of how many days they must have endured on the unimaginably ancient dunes. He’d been involved with the planning of this meeting, and felt lucky that his part of the journey had required him to hop between the hundreds of minor heavenly islands just north of Madagascar, avoiding Danish patrols until he could enter the continent from the east. Making arrangements to bring the rest of the delegates into Zaire, creating false papers for each of them and providing them with the means to support themselves on a walk through the world’s less populated desert had been a considerable challenge, but for those who couldn’t follow Yakub it had been judged the least risky option. Airship traffic was forbidden in Canutic colonies, and the treacherously foggy coast of Namib made sea access dubious. However, given the unpredictable duration of an arrival by land, the bomb test had not been scheduled to occur on a fixed date of that month, but on whichever day all the conspirators could make it to the designated site.

To give his eyes rest, Yakub looked away from the bright horizon and reviewed the notes he kept in his tent. The first half of Gilberto’s journey had to pass through Angola, which shared with Zaire the same colonial administration. From the assortment of identity papers his fellow independentist operatives had forged for him, Gilberto would be using the ones that stated his profession as priest. As a general rule, imperial authorities treated black travelers with suspicion, especially those coming from the outrageously freethinking and therefore papally damned colony of Zaire, but someone wearing the trappings of a minister of the true faith could hope to travel relatively unmolested. The difficult part was the final crossing into Namib, a Canutic possession, where Catholics were not welcome. Different documents and different stories were needed there.

The sound of people conversing and camels grunting grew nearer until he left his tent again and noticed that the bomb builders had gathered to greet the caravan. He’d met Gilberto only once, during the planning stages of the bomb project, but he might still have recognized his face if the sun and the dehydration hadn’t shriveled it.

Yakub called for his secretary and said to him in Arabic, “Get to the rations tent and fetch enough water for them.” He walked to Gilberto’s camel and helped him dismount as he greeted him in Spanish. “Welcome to the inaugural day of the future.”

Gilberto’s tongue made a cautious sweep over the cracks on his lips before it was ready to answer. “Yakub, the future will happen with or without us. The question is whether we’re worthy of it.”

Yakub asked his group, “Was he this serious the whole trip?”

“We discussed other matters,” said Gilberto. “Let me introduce you to Hana Te Ngaru, from the Moriori.”

In order to circumvent the infinite variety in conventions of courtesy, a quick bow of the head had emerged among Alliance members as the simplest timesaver. Yakub greeted Hana thusly before asking in Danish, “I hope none of you had any health complications.”

“We’re in one piece,” she replied, “just awfully thirsty.”

“How about your camels?”

“At the last oasis they gobbled up enough water to last them until we return there.”

“Then make yourselves at home. I’ll tell the builders to finish the setup.” His secretary arrived with a large bucket of water and clay cups that were promptly passed around. Upon seeing a member of Gilberto’s entourage join the conversation and introduce himself as a translator, Yakub switched back to Spanish. “You probably wish to meet our other observer from the supporting side, but she’s busy at the moment helping the builders. She’s enthusiastic about the test.”

“Who was sent?” asked Gilberto, filling his cup with more water.

“That was a bit of a surprise to me. At first, I’d been told our side was going to send the delegate from the Jamaican colony, but when I arrived here I met this lady who told me he’d been seized by the Dutch before leaving the island, so she’d been asked to come in his stead.”

They both raised their cups in honor of their lost ally. Yakub tried not to dwell on when it had become an automatic gesture.

“Who is she?” asked Hana.

“Piedad Ruiz, from the Selknam.”

“Which people is that?”

“Southern tip of Columbia. They’ve been hit the hardest by Canutic policy. All that wood burning around the pole has hurt them beyond words.”

“A logical choice of delegate,” Gilberto muttered, and Yakub tried to not let it show that he’d heard.

Assistants and clerks in the newcomer group were still dismounting from their camels, and an old man afflicted with a heavy sunburn approached the conversation timidly. Yakub asked, “Whom else do we have the honor of receiving?”

Gilberto noticed the man and brought him closer. “This is Gediminas, my secretary. This is his first assignment with us.”

Gediminas stretched his hand and was met with Yakub’s bow. “Ah, my… my name is Gediminas Kalnietis,” he said in imperfect Spanish.

Yakub’s attention was drawn away from the awkwardness of the not-shaken hand. “Have I heard your name? Where are you from?”

“I’m from Lithuania.”

“Lithuania… do we have members there?”

Hana said, with a tone of impatience, “He’s a sympathizer. Gilberto recruited him as an insider in the Iberian Empire.”

Gediminas understood her Danish and looked ashamed by that description. Yakub felt moved to encourage him. “Don’t worry. You’re not the first European to switch sides. Our cause is getting stronger by the day, and when this tyranny is over, you’ll be glad you stood on the right side. Have more water and prepare to enjoy the demonstration.”

Yakub motioned for Gilberto and Hana to go with him into his tent, hinting he had more sensitive news to share. Gilberto insisted on bringing his secretary, and Yakub saw no choice but to allow it.

In the tent, they sat around a small stove and Yakub gave them bowls of chickpea soup. Instead of serving one for himself, he looked in his satchel for a folder and placed it on the rug. Without wasting words, he blurted out, “The Alliance believes one of our member nations is taking their own initiative against the empires.”

When Hana finished hearing the translation, she asked, “Which member?”

Yakub handed her the version of the report in Danish. “No clue,” he said. “This we know: in June, a fleet of airships dropped explosives on Rome. A few churches were hit, a cardinal was hurt, and everyone is making up their own explanations.” He saw the change on Gilberto’s face and nodded. “You’re right to be shocked. The Alliance doesn’t know what to make of this news. Those of us who live in the Chinese area of influence have been trying to get in touch with the Tuaregs, because they have the largest number of spies in the Pontifical States, but airship mail has gotten slower than usual. The other tribes haven’t had any more success, but it’s obvious that more things are happening than Rome admits.”

Hana appeared thoughtful. “What about the airships?”

Yakub switched to Danish. “There’s no hint of where they arrived from, but the Tuaregs were able to infer their design from one witness account. It matches the high-altitude airships that the Catalans use to patrol the French border.”

The translator had turned to talk in Spanish to Gilberto, who remarked, “That information is of little help.”

“Right,” said Yakub. “We don’t even know which faction could have authorized the attack. The list of targets for bombing hadn’t even been disclosed to member nations.”

Gediminas stared at Yakub with eyes wide open. “Rome is a target of this project?”

“One of three, actually. In a discussion we had among the supporting side, we agreed we’d fully explain the plan of attack to you after the test. I only know part of it. Piedad knows the names of the other two cities.”

“In the opposing side,” said Gilberto, “we came up with a proposal for you to let us review the list of targets and suggest alternate locations.”

Yakub shook his head. “That would be strategically unwise. We can’t risk having the plan of attack modified by the faction that doesn’t want a plan of attack. You are here to observe.”

Gilberto leaned toward his secretary and whispered, “What did I tell you?” loud enough for the rest to hear it.

“Wait,” said Yakub, back in Spanish, “don’t misunderstand me: I don’t question your loyalty to the Alliance of Survivor Peoples—”

“But you do.”

Gilberto’s interruption left Yakub speechless for a moment. “I didn’t know you believed that. You have changed. What happened to you?”

“Since the last time you saw me? I paid a visit to Neema.” He had started talking so fast his words were trampling over one another. “I had to do it per your instructions.”

Yakub’s face was transformed; his confident enthusiasm had dissolved into an expression of deep shame. “I… I wish I’d had the honor of seeing her too.”

“Don’t praise her. You don’t dare. I went because you asked me to confirm she wasn’t going to warn our enemies. You made me visit her not as a friend but as an Inquisitor.”

“That’s not fair—”

“You weren’t there.” By this point Gilberto was in a hurry to finish each sentence before weeping took over his breath. “You didn’t see her face as I threw carefully worded insults at her just to calm your doubts. The mere insinuation that she might want to sabotage our cause brought her to tears.”

Yakub looked down at his hands. “I didn’t know. Your report didn’t mention any of this. I’m sorry.”

Gilberto’s eyes were fixated on him and his voice rose as he went on, “She gave your faction every detail you wanted about the bomb, and she died convinced that she was no longer trusted.”

“Will you stop blaming me? We have never forgotten our debt to her. There wouldn’t even be a plan for independence without the Likasi Renaissance. All we’re doing here is possible thanks to her.”

“We’re worried,” said Hana, “that your side may do something disrespectful to her. We read your proposal to name one of the bombs after Neema’s mother, and we find it despicable.”

“That tells us nothing meaningful. Your side finds the entire bomb project despicable.”

“Let me make it simple,” interjected Gilberto. “Destroying a city is wrong. But your plan is to destroy more than one, which crosses the line between wrong and evil.”

“We’ll not redo the vote today,” said Yakub. “The Alliance made its decision. We will attack. And as for Neema’s feelings, she was a voice against the bomb, a voice which carried influence, so we had every right to preserve the secrecy of the project.” He looked up. “Piedad, good to see you. Come in.” Piedad entered the tent and sat down. She was around the same age as Hana, younger than Gediminas but a senior to the others. “Meet Gilberto Rezende and Hana Te Ngaru, and this gentleman is Gilberto’s secretary, whose name I’m sorry to forget.”

Piedad took the bowl of soup she was offered and opened her mouth to provide her update on the preparations for the test, but was interrupted by the unfinished discussion.

“Neema would never have betrayed us.” Gilberto’s voice was on the verge of breaking into a sob.

Yakub offered his hands in a gesture of helplessness. “Then let’s be glad she didn’t, and let’s move on.”

The silence quickly made Piedad uncomfortable. Wishing desperately to change to a less heated topic of conversation, she turned to Hana. “Forgive my curiosity,” she asked in Danish. “Is Te Ngaru a common surname among your people?”

Hana welcomed the tangent. “The answer to that is rather long.”

“That’s fine with me.”

“All right. First of all, the tribes of Aotearoa don’t really use surnames the way Europeans understand them. I took the name Te Ngaru from my mother’s side of the family.”

Piedad mulled it over. “So you don’t have a surname?”

“Legally speaking, I should. Not that I can use it, anyway. My father’s Norwegian, but I’m barred from claiming his lineage, his lands, or his coat of arms, which I can’t fathom what I’d do with.”

“Why can’t you take your father’s surname?”

“Canutic law requires people of mixed race to add some permanent identifier to their legal names so we can’t try to pass ourselves off as Europeans. In the colony of New Sjælland, that identifier is Ngati Pākehā. In all my legal papers,” she paused, taking a deep breath that Piedad heard as signaling lifelong exhaustion, “I have the surname Ngati Pākehā.”

“Is that a word in your language?”

“It’s not even from my people’s language, but we’re under the same governor as the Māori, so the whole colony follows the same laws. Why do you ask?”

“Maybe it’s a silly coincidence. I attended the meeting when the Alliance voted to develop the bomb, and I remember the Moriori delegate who voted against it. Your face reminds me of him, and I was wondering whether you two might be related. He introduced himself as Lars Te Ngaru.”

“Ah. I… yes.”

“I overheard him having an argument after we’d voted. I’m not going to say he convinced me, but he made some powerful points. Do you know him?”

Hana drew her face closer to Piedad’s. “That was me. I used to be known by that name. I mean, my Canutic papers still say that name, but I no longer use it for Alliance business.”

“Oh…” Piedad stood motionless for an embarrassingly long time. “Is that something people of the Pacific do?”

Hana almost laughed. “It’s something people—period—do.” She continued eating without waiting for Piedad to say more.

Gediminas said to Yakub, “I’d like to know how the bombing targets were selected.”

“Exact retribution,” he explained. “The empires have destroyed the sacred sites of the nations they’ve conquered, so we’re going to destroy their sacred sites.”

“Such as Rome,” whispered the old man.

“It’s the quickest way,” said Piedad, shooting a glance of reproach at Yakub. “It’ll make them realize we’re stronger than their god. It’ll force them to negotiate.”

Gilberto asked Piedad, “And the other targets? Rome only matters to the Iberians. What will make the other empires care?”

“The idea was to ask you to wait until after the test, but I see Yakub has already ruined part of the surprise.”

Hana said in fast Danish, “Organize this ugly affair any way you want, but don’t treat the deaths of thousands like news of a baby’s name.”

Piedad looked hurt by the remark. The translator whispered in Gilberto’s ear and he glanced at Hana, unsure that she’d intended that effect, but her face was unreadable. Then Piedad said in a less confident voice, “Look, I don’t presume to know how many we’ll kill or how many we’ll save, and I’m not convinced that numbers decide the matter.”

“A number of votes already did,” said Hana, “so don’t pretend to feel conflicted. There’s a quick solution for when you don’t agree with what you’re doing, and it’s to not do it.”

None of them dared to break the silence that followed. They continued eating except Yakub. He noticed a swift exchange of looks between Gilberto and his secretary, and the unpleasant suspicion that he wasn’t getting the full picture moved him to try and know this old man. “How are things in Spain? What’s life like in the capital of the world?”

Gediminas shuddered and looked at Gilberto again.

“What’s the matter with you two?” asked Yakub. “Can’t he speak without your permission? What kind of liberation movement are we running here?”

Gilberto nodded at the old man, and he considered his reply carefully. “The most salient news that comes to mind is from the realm of letters. People are tired of reading the same boastful tales about the war and the victory over the Protestants. Now they want to read about the colonies. Sons of rich families will travel abroad for a year and return home to speak ill of the empire. From time to time, a copy of one of those books finds its way around censors and into the hands of an idealistic youngster. That small circumstance may… push a life in a risky direction. The effect accumulates with each new reader. On the surface, people flaunt their wealth, but those who pay attention can detect an unconfessed sense of repulsion.”

“Repulsion for what?” asked Piedad.

“Citizens of the empire are starting to feel uncomfortable about the source of their prosperity.”

“Oh, they’re growing a conscience now?” asked Yakub.

“No, it’s not a thing of now,” said Gediminas. “There have always been voices against the colonial system. Since the beginning. But they’re growing louder. Criticism of imperial policy is not as unthinkable as it used to be. Inquisitors have opened a new division for investigating,” he paused as he searched for the right word, “anomalous political opinions.”

“What do those books say?” asked Hana.

“Let me remember… I saw a book, don’t ask me how I obtained it, that bore the title The Nine Conquests of Peru. It’s rather repetitive; every once in a while some band made up from descendants of Spaniards rises up with the help of a Native army and declares a republic, and every time the king sends airships to bomb them back into submission. The tale emulates the flavor of a classical epic, but the king doesn’t end up looking good.”

Gilberto couldn’t believe what he was hearing. “That was written by a Spaniard?”

“You have fewer enemies than it looks from here. But the pleasures of chocolate, and potatoes, and peanuts, and coca tea, and alpaca wool, all in abundance without having to work for them… to renounce that takes a stronger soul than most have.”

“Nothing new there,” said Yakub. “We know the souls of our enemies.”

“I wonder how much of our souls we’ll keep after we follow your plan,” said Gilberto.

What Yakub was going to say was forgotten when his secretary poked his head inside the tent and announced that the bomb was all but ready.

They stepped back to the sun-scorched sand and Yakub handed them thick gray eyeglasses. “A weapon like this has never been fired, but our experts predict it will get shiny.” They followed him to the observation site. “You should be safe at this distance,” he explained, “but that means we couldn’t bring enough wire to detonate the bomb from here. The builders tell me they’re going to try a new method. They’re going to use the air as a wire.”

“Is that possible?” asked Gilberto. “We haven’t heard of that in Likasi.”

“The work that began in Likasi is being multiplied in colonies that find a way to study in secret. This particular trick was discovered at the Puerto Rico school. They were studying thunderstorms and stumbled on wireless transmission. So far it’s only workable for small amounts of energy, but we’re living in promising times.” Yakub’s gaze was still on the horizon, but the corner of his eye confirmed that Gilberto looked as discouraged as he’d intended. “Now we wait, although I don’t know what else they need to adjust.”

The minutes passed. Even if they weren’t standing in the open on the desert sand, the anticipation would still be making Yakub sweat. His colleagues in the Alliance counted on the success of their experts; they’d told him repeatedly that their chance to remedy the state of the world depended on a usable bomb. His predecessor had been one of several dozen couriers who’d risked their lives transporting research notes between secret workshops; the project had demanded the intelligence and the health of thousands of people. The might of the empires had been based on the invention and exclusive possession of a unique form of weapon. Yakub agreed with his colleagues’ sentiment that now it was their turn to build their own.

Without warning, because none was possible, because to a race of bipeds just descended from trees an accurate summation of the facts would have carried no meaning and an explanation of the meaning would have sliced into their hearts, the glow of a light not made for fleshly eyes filled the span of the horizon followed by an eruption that spread rampaging in all directions in an unstoppable avalanche of wind that slammed against men and women like the forbidden secret of creation foolishly unleashed and the painful scream of reality itself as it was ripped apart and the dreadful foretaste of every death within its power and the sound of God’s foot stomping on the sins of mortals.

They left their position and walked to meet with the builders. No word was said; words had lost their usefulness. Even Yakub trembled with terror at what he’d seen. His legs threatened to fail him under the weight of his thoughts. He dared not take another look at the gigantic mushroom that had sprouted in the distance, or at any of his fellow human beings. He still wasn’t able to aim his eyes at those of the bomb experts when he joined their celebration and embraced them with hands that to him felt full of soot. He didn’t recognize his voice when he finally found it and said, “Congratulations to all of you, and to the countless others who have worked toward this moment. Your genius has brought our liberation.”

“People first lived by the sun,” said Gediminas all of a sudden. None of the others understood what he was talking about, and he didn’t seem to be addressing them. “Until one day,” he went on, “they lit their own fires.” He paid no mind to their puzzled reaction. “Then they learned to make fire work for them. And even the storm was subdued to their will.” He glanced with terror at the cloud that still grew behind him. “Now the cycle is complete; people have stolen the sun’s secret.” He fell silent for a long while, and the others followed suit. When the mystery about his meaning seemed like it had finally moved them to voice a question, Gediminas added, “This is a Fifth Age of Fire,” and no more was said until they returned to the camp.

Afternoon, August 17 (Julian), 1999

Namib Desert

They spent the hours that followed drinking more water and resting. When the air began to cool, they sat around a fire outside Yakub’s tent.

“What progress are they making at the other schools?” Gilberto was trying to talk of anything that wasn’t the bomb.

“As far as I know,” said Yakub, “there are three more around the world. But it’s getting harder to get any study done. The Inquisition has taken an acute interest in a theory proposed by Neema’s mother, the Long Genealogy of Humankind.”

“I’ve heard of it,” said Hana. “I can imagine why it would bother them.”

“Bother falls short,” he replied. “My people trade with the Mijikenda of Zanzibar, and they have tales of ancient bones that travelers find by chance. That sends the Danes in a frenzy to hide the bones. The same thing is happening all over the world. Cities are expanding, and engineers need to dig. Remains of ancestors have begun showing up in inconvenient places, and when they look a bit too apelike, the colonial governor declares the findings blasphemous and orders their destruction.”

“One can only hope there are more to be found,” said Gilberto.

“I couldn’t tell you,” said Yakub. “That’s a matter to address after we win.”

“What happens to someone who is hit by this bomb?” asked Gediminas, and Gilberto’s face stiffened.

Yakub wanted to ask what unspoken disagreement existed between Gilberto and his secretary, but didn’t think it was the right moment. “Those at the center of the explosion simply disappear. Their bodies turn to nothing. It may not even hurt; I don’t know.”

“It almost sounds merciful,” said Hana in an unmistakable tone.

“Those reached by the mushroom will die of burns,” continued Yakub. “Even those who don’t get too badly burned may be hit by a building flung away by the wind.”

“How do you know so many details?” asked Gilberto.

Piedad tried, and failed, to give Yakub a discreet look. “Well, there isn’t really any harm in you knowing. This is not the first detonation.”

Before Gilberto could protest, Hana said, “Something told me you wouldn’t have risked trying the wireless method in our presence without knowing it worked.”

“You’re right,” said Piedad.

“Where was the actual first test?” asked Hana. “Please tell me you haven’t started war already.”

“Your doubts insult us,” said Yakub.

Ignoring the barb, Piedad replied, “We chose Atacama. It’s as isolated and as inhospitable as Namib. We tested the effects on a large group of carefully positioned goats.”

Gediminas wasn’t done with his questions. “We were a very long distance from the mushroom. Why did we have to?”

Yakub explained, “The explosive material produces invisible energy that kills humans. Those who aren’t caught in the explosion, but stand much closer than we were, may only feel a wave of heat at first, but they will die too.”

“How?” asked the old man, perplexed by the idea of a mysterious killing force.

Gilberto spoke before Yakub could, “Like Neema. They will spend years in pain that will only worsen as their insides rot with poison. They will be cursed to a slow death.”

Gediminas hesitated under Gilberto’s disapproving gaze, but in the end decided to speak again. “When are you planning to do this?”

Piedad ignored Gilberto’s discomfort and said, “With all the obstacles we face in communicating and smuggling materials from one place to another, it will take us three years to complete the production of three more bombs. As it happens, the year 2002 provides us with a perfect opportunity for a strike: three holy days will fall in the same week.”

“We mustn’t waste any time,” said Yakub. “It was difficult enough to get one bomb made and transported here.”

“I know,” said Piedad. “Logistics is always a problem. However, Rome is easy. It can be reached by air or sea. That will be the third target.”

“And the others?” asked Hana.

“I know this will seem an odd choice, but Yakub’s suggestion to punish the Ottoman Empire was accepted, and the first target will be Mecca.”

Gilberto frowned. “That city doesn’t matter to more than one-sixth of the combined imperial populations.”

“True,” said Piedad, “but remember, we’ll also be striking at the heart of Christendom. It’s probable that the entire religion will collapse, and we don’t want them to have an alternative to run to.”

“What is the other target?” asked Gediminas.

She risked a wary glance at Yakub before replying, “Jerusalem.”

“What?” said everyone.

“I was told you wouldn’t like it, and the original idea was that none of you should hear it today, but the preparations ahead of us rely on so much coordination that I insisted all parties needed to know.”

Yakub jumped to his feet. “Piedad, tell me this is a mistake. The Alliance can’t pretend to not know what Jerusalem is to us.”

“That’s exactly why they didn’t want to reveal this part of the plan.”

“But what are they thinking? Do they imagine we’d let them hit Jerusalem as if it were nothing? Did no one else object? There are plenty of other tribes in our faction. What did the Ashkenazim have to say about this? Or the Mizrahim? We have the Mizrahim living in the target area, and no one thought that could be a problem?”

Piedad sighed. “I think I don’t need to explain why the Alliance preferred discretion. We’re also keeping Mecca a secret from our Muslim tribes.”

“No, no, no, no. I’ve been involved in this project as much as everyone who voted for it. Why didn’t anyone think I deserved to be notified of this?”

Piedad closed her eyes and took a breath to calm herself. “I told you. Your people’s connection to the target was considered incompatible with early disclosure of the plan of attack.”

Yakub pointed a finger at her. He was shaking with fury. “No, you won’t do that. We the children of Israel have suffered the calumny of every nation we’ve lived in. Time after time, they’ve smeared our sacred covenant and held it against us as proof of treachery. I won’t permit the Alliance to treat us the same way.”

Throughout the discussion, Hana had been paying attention to the translator and choosing her own words with painstaking care until she was able to say, “I can’t presume to understand fully, or even mostly, the special nature of your people’s connection to Jerusalem. What I can say on the matter stems from my effort at empathy, even if it’s not informed by any experience that we share. It’s clear that you care about that place. It’s valuable to you. So one thing you can do is take the shock that you’re feeling and place yourself in the position of the people for whom your other targets are just as valuable.”

Yakub didn’t even hear her. He started pacing in circles, breathing in quick gulps. “Gilberto, show me your proposal. Jerusalem is off the table. We have to destroy some other city.”

“To tell you the truth,” he replied, “we didn’t come prepared with a specific list of targets, because we didn’t know yours. But now that we’re on the same page—”

Gediminas let out a screech of despair. “Please, you don’t need to use this punishment! What you’ve done today will be enough.” Tears covered his face and he fell to his knees. “I’ll talk to all the kings if you want; I’ll tell them to set you free, but I beg you, spare the world from your wrath.”

Piedad looked at Gilberto. “What’s wrong with him? Since he arrived in here, he’s done nothing but squirm. Where did you find this man?”

Gilberto embraced Gediminas while he continued crying. “I forced him to come.”

The translator spoke to Hana, and she asked Gilberto, “Is there something I should know?”

“Yes, and I’m sorry that I had to bring him here, but he’s going to help us win our freedom without using the bomb.”

Yakub snatched Gediminas away from Gilberto and snarled, “Who are you?”

“Gediminas Kalnietis,” he stuttered between tears, but Yakub caught the way the man didn’t lose sight of Gilberto, and turned to him. “Why is your secretary so afraid of you?”

“Because I told him I’d kill him if he said more than he ought to.”

Piedad took Yakub’s arm and forced him to look at her. “Let go of the poor man.”

Hana listened to the translator and turned to Gilberto, “I don’t appreciate you going behind my back and issuing threats that compromise the Alliance.”

“You’re right, you’re completely right, and I’m sorry that I didn’t tell you about this.”

“We’re waiting for an answer,” said Piedad.

“Well, he’s seen the bomb, so I guess his job is done. I was counting on how few people out of Europe have seen his face, but you know him by the name of His Holiness Michael II.”

Yakub’s jaw dropped. “What are you talking about?”

Gilberto attempted a half smile, but was too nervous to make one. “The attack on Rome? That was me. I captured this man to show him what the bomb was capable of, so he’d spread word of our strength and force the kings to listen without us having to harm one soul.”

Piedad leaped at Gilberto and punched his face. “You damned traitor, you exposed us!”

Yakub tried to hit him too, but Hana restrained him. Her eyes questioned the translator, and he hurried to tell her what was going on. “Both of you, let him explain himself!”

“What’s there to explain?” yelled Yakub. “He betrayed us to the Pope! We should kill both of them!”

Hana still struggled to keep him from joining the fight. Piedad had thrown Gilberto to the ground and was kicking his ribcage. Hana screamed, “Please, listen! This is the best idea any of us has had in years.”

Yakub stopped resisting and turned toward her. “What?” Even Piedad looked at her in disbelief.

Hana let go of Yakub and helped Gilberto stand. “I swear I didn’t know about this, and I don’t like it, but it’s better than your plan.”

“No, we’ve worked too hard on this,” said Yakub, before running into his tent. When he came out, his hand was holding a pistol. “I’m not going to let the Pope, of all people, warn our enemies of what’s coming for them.”

He raised his arm and Hana ran to place herself in front of Gediminas. “No one will die here.”

“You don’t fool me,” said Yakub, aiming the pistol at her. “Move aside. I know your people aren’t fighters.”

“If you kill him,” said Hana very slowly, “we’ll lose the opportunity to save more than just ourselves.” Piedad and Gilberto were petrified; Michael II was covering his face with his hands; Hana’s face showed no trace of fear. “I can see where Gilberto got this idea. You were worried that Neema’s voice was too respected. Here we have the most respected voice in the world, and we can use it.”

Yakub shook his head. “You talk about respect? Can you even name the last pope who wasn’t a murderer of Jews?”

“You carry a wound. We share that with you. I could tell you stories of what Lutheran ministers have done to my people, and surely everyone on this desert has something to add. We don’t need to treat each other as enemies.” Gilberto wanted to speak, but his ribs hurt too much for him to take enough air in.

“I’m telling you for the last time. Move aside.”

“No. You don’t know what you’re planning to do, and you need to be shown what it is. Maybe you don’t care about killing all the inhabitants of Rome as long as you hurt one who deserves it. If I refuse to move, it’s because you need to learn what your way entails. The Alliance may have decided that thousands of nameless corpses don’t matter. So I’m forcing you to see, at a scale that you can grasp, the face of the innocents you’ll be stepping over on your way to your victory. And if you still haven’t decided to shoot me, I’m betting my life that it’s because, when the dilemma is presented to you at this scale, you’re able to understand that this way is wrong.”

Yakub’s hold on the pistol was slipping. With excruciating movements, Gilberto stepped next to him and took it from his hand. “That’s enough,” he managed to say.

For a long time the translator’s anxious breathing was the only sound any of them made.

Piedad sat on the sand, on the verge of tears. “What do we do now?” She looked up at Gilberto. “What was your plan after this point?”

Gilberto sat opposite her and took the time to regain his breath. “My plan is that I send the Pope back to Europe.” He breathed again. “He’ll talk of us.” Another breath. “And then, we’ll all gather with the imperial governments and talk more.”

“You can’t be serious,” said Yakub.

“I’m completely serious,” said Gilberto.

“It’s too optimistic,” said Hana, “even to me.”

By that point Michael II had stopped crying and now he was motioning for them to hear him. “What you have showed me has convinced me. You have been injured in too many ways, and no one could deny you your right of revenge. I shall strive to move the hearts of the people in the three empires, but even I can’t reach everyone.”

Yakub gave Hana a mocking glance. “Another problem of scale.”

“Then let’s repeat what we’ve done here,” she said, “but on a larger scale.” The rest were left speechless, and she added, “No, we’re not going to launch the bomb on any city. But we can stage demonstrations on uninhabited areas sufficiently close to our targets to make an exhibition of our strength. In fact, that’s the proposal Gilberto and I were going to make to you; I just didn’t know he didn’t believe in our ability to persuade you on our own.”

“You wouldn’t have joined me at Rome.”

“Because it was an irresponsible idea.” She turned to the others. “In any case, what we’ve done to Michael II we can do to many others. That will more than suffice to make our point.”

“Our point won’t be clear without a message,” said Gilberto. “We need to tell them what will happen, and explain why we’re doing it. That will get them to talk to us.”

“So you did want to warn them after all,” said Yakub.

“Admit that it can work,” said Piedad. “We still have the option of destroying their cities if it doesn’t.”

Hana leaned toward her and helped her stand. “We always have the option of renouncing our essential goodness. But if among the people who enjoy the fruits of our subjection there are sufficiently many who haven’t lost theirs, we won’t have to.”

Sunset, Shawwal 1 (Hijri), 1423

Red Sea, within territorial waters of the Sharifate of Mecca

Just as the sun moved below the horizon, a blinding burst of light seemed to bring the day back.

Sunset, Tevet 2 (Hebrew), 5763

Mount Ramon, in the demilitarized zone between Chinese-occupied Palestine and the Swedish Protectorate of Sinai

Then came a furious wind with a roar that ripped the heavens and made the earth tremble.

Sunset, December 8 (Gregorian), 2002

Giannutri Island, disputed between the Pontifical States and the Republic of Genoa

And when everyone’s sight returned, they went out and saw in the horizon a pillar of fire rising in the shape of a mushroom.

Morning, Rabiulawal 10 (Hijri), 1424

Malaca City

The only place on Earth deemed sufficiently neutral for its first global congregation was the only realm that the three big empires had at one time captured and the only one that had succeeded in eventually casting off their invasions. Even under relentless assault by different branches of Christianity, the Malaca Sultanate had stayed stubbornly Muslim, but now, after the panicked and increasingly embellished reports of the portal to hell that had opened near Mecca, even that faith was in question.

The Alliance of Survivor Peoples was in session. In addition to the representatives from the member nations, the imperial powers had sent envoys in response to the Manifesto of Emancipation that had been delivered to their courts on the day prior to the first bombing. Watching those men take their seats at the center of the meeting hall, Gilberto savored one unforeseen consequence of the secrecy of the project: none of the empires had developed a scientific tradition like the one sprouted from Likasi, and the best explanation they had come up with to account for the terror of the bombs was that the colonies had resorted to some forbidden witchcraft against their rulers. The terrified testimony of Michael II, returned to Europe just when the Cardinals were done electing a new Pope, had only deepened the kings’ reaction. Faced with supernatural powers beyond their comprehension, their plea to negotiate had been immediate.

Veteran diplomat Marcelino de Carvajal y Travesedo, sent directly from Madrid, sat uncomfortably at the central table, sensing the pressure of hundreds of gazes aimed at him. At his sides were Koenraad Meijer, a Dutchman in the service of the Danish Crown, visibly uneasy about dealing with the future of the empire instead of insipid trade deals; and Crown Prince Bolai of the Great Ming, inexperienced in politics but required by tradition to be the public face of the Son of the Heavenly Lord. Delegates from other empires, including the French, the Ottomans, and the Californians, were sitting behind them, but everyone present understood that the core issues depended on what the three main powers had to say.

Gilberto was presiding this session, and he didn’t bother concealing his satisfaction. The pacifists had prevailed. He took notice of Yakub watching his motions from one side of the hall, but the opposition between them was no longer of consequence. The goal had been achieved.

Hana sat next to Gilberto, opened a folder with papers, organized them on her desk, and addressed the central table. “Your judgment was made years before this meeting.”

She spoke in Moriori, and before the designated translators could begin transmitting her message, the imperial delegates started to voice complaints that Gilberto silenced. “This is a meeting for all peoples of the world,” he said in Kituba. “Our official language is all languages. You have been provided with translators; pay attention to them. We do not operate by your rules.”

Crown Prince Bolai shouted a sentence, and his translator relayed, “Your uncultured tongue injures my ears.”

“We’ll talk of injuries in a moment,” said Gilberto.

Hana read from her notes, “The Alliance of Survivor Peoples has found you guilty of repeated murder, kidnapping, enslavement, desecration, rape, and pillage. Furthermore, you have taught your children that these actions were natural and necessary, and taught us that we deserved them. Your guilt is beyond discussion. What remains is to assign your penalty.” The imperial delegates said nothing; they appeared to want to laugh at the accusations, but the presence of so many accusers inhibited them. Hana went on, “I will now read the list of demands we have for each of you.” She opened another folder. “As a first step toward repairing relations between the peoples of the world, there must be openness with regard to the fruits of knowledge. China will make the principles of its combustion engines available to all nations.”

“Ridiculous!” said Bolai. “Those engines constitute our tactical advantage. They are a state secret.”

“The events of the past year should have taught you that your nation no longer has a tactical advantage,” said Hana. “Against our clouds of fire, ten thousand steam engines are powerless. Any future war you may be planning against your colonies is already lost. You incur no further loss by sharing your technological expertise.”

“Am I to assume that you also want the secret of the submarine and the airship?” asked Meijer.

“That won’t be necessary,” said Gilberto. “We have plenty of our own. But there’s something we do want from your king. He will give us,” and he placed a finger on a line in his papers, “his signed admission that the heating of the world was an intentional scheme by the Canutic Empire with the sole purpose of facilitating maritime transit for its harbors in the Arctic. Moreover, the Danish nation will commit to cease all burning in both polar regions and start researching solutions to repair the damage it has done to the world’s climate.”

After pondering his words, Meijer replied in a cautious tone, “That is… not… wholly unreasonable.” He met Gilberto’s skeptical gaze and added, “I promise to speak to my king about this.”

“Will you yield the secrets of your satanic dealings, too?” asked Carvajal. “Or will you continue to hold us hostage?”

“We don’t owe you that answer. The amount of what we owe to you is exactly nothing.”

Carvajal chuckled with disgust. “God will collect what you owe. You will pay in the next life for each spell you have cast.”

Gilberto had hoped to avoid adding any more support to that interpretation of the events, but he couldn’t hold himself. “We have proven that we can cast our spells as close to your holy cities as we please, and the only reason those cities still stand is that we chose to be more merciful than you’ve been to us. We have proven that we can do our dark magic on your holy days, and your god was unable to stop us. That is how things stand between us. You are not here to negotiate, but to surrender.”

Carvajal pulled back his chair and turned to leave. “You will not intimidate us with your demonic sorcery.”

With chilling calm, Gilberto warned, “We still have enough sorcery left for each of your cities.” He hated himself as soon as he launched that threat. He didn’t know for a fact that enough antonite existed in the world, and the last thing he’d said to Neema had been his oath to never let the bomb be used against actual targets, but Carvajal knew none of that, and his words had sufficed to keep him from walking. “If you leave this room without signing our terms, there won’t be a Spain for you to return to.”

Meijer pulled Carvajal back to his chair, doing his best to ignore the repressed laughter in the room. “We will hear your terms.”

Hana took another of her papers and started reading, “We are declaring independence from you.” She ignored the three men’s gestures of dismissal and added, “Those of us who have survived the centuries of your tyranny have earned our freedom by the mere fact that we are still in this world, and you failed to break our spirit. Your empires will retreat back to their homelands, and the colonies will form autonomous governments. All trade with us will be conducted on a basis of equality.”

Bolai erupted in laughter. “You can’t expect us to deal with barbarians as equals!”

Unfazed, Hana continued, “Also, you will forevermore cease to capture, trade, and keep slaves.”

Meijer’s face transformed into a mask of fury and he slammed the table. “That’s absurd! You’re demanding we give up our wealth!”

“Let’s talk about wealth,” said Gilberto. “You come from the Netherlands. Your people used to be a colony, too. You were the first in the world to win freedom from Spain. What kind of wealth did you have back then? You used to be a nation of honest workers, a beacon of high learning, a refuge for victims of the Inquisition. So why aren’t you sitting here next to us? Why aren’t you fighting for our cause? You know the answer. As soon as you were free, you sampled your own bite of empire and found it too tasty to quit.”

Hana spoke next. “We know it may feel like we’re condemning you to ruin. Slave labor in the colonies sustains the entire imperial economy. What we’re asking of you is not that you starve, but that you learn to feed yourselves. We don’t belong to you. If you need to use our resources, or our knowledge, or our work, you’ll no longer be able to just take it. You’ll have to trade with us, and we’ll make sure you do so fairly.”

Carvajal’s voice rose to a shout. “We can’t abandon our interests in the colonies. We can’t throw away centuries of civilizing effort!”

Gilberto’s reply was automatic. “You’re not worth arguing civilization with.”

Bolai jumped to his feet. “I didn’t come here to be insulted.” He turned to leave, and the others grabbed him by his arms.

“No, you came here to surrender,” repeated Gilberto. “Now sit. You don’t get to play the offended party here.”

“How are we even supposed to execute that demand?” asked Meijer.

Gilberto drew out a series of notes. “China hasn’t hesitated to install long-distance communication wires like the ones we have in Likasi, but you Europeans are terrified that it’s going to steal your souls or something, so we’re going to have to do it the old way. Your fastest submarine takes two months to cover the distance from Malaca City back to Copenhagen via Suez and Gibraltar. Once there, you will tell your king to issue a decree of liberation for all slaves in the empire.”

“My transport can’t make that time,” protested Meijer.

“Then I guess you’ll have to fly with your Spanish friend, and I’ll have to trust that you won’t kill each other along the way.” Gilberto consulted his notes. “The speed of communication between Madrid and its remotest colony, which is Guam, is three weeks on your best airship. The Asian provinces of the Canutic Empire are capable of sending word to Hawaii in a comparable timeframe.” He put his papers down and pointed a finger at the delegates. “That’s how long we’ll wait. Your kings have three months to free all colonies and all slaves and prevent us from wiping out your capital cities.”

“That’s enough!” yelled Carvajal. “Such aggressive language has no place in international relations. This is the vilest form of blackmail.”

Gilberto stared at him without the tiniest bit of sympathy. “I will make myself clearer, in case I wasn’t already.” He kept his rage steady as he carefully enunciated each word. “Empires will end. Slavery will end. That is a fact. We have refrained from delivering the punishment this evil cries out for, we are granting you more time than you deserve, and we will destroy one imperial city,” he raised his tone over the delegates’ protests, “for each month after our deadline that even one of your kings has failed to comply, and that goes for every other empire on this planet. Do we understand each other?”

The hall fell silent.

“Good,” said Gilberto. “I hope that puts your precious economies under a clearer perspective.” He prayed for his face to not betray the fact that he had no intention of hurting anyone. “I know you’ll find a way to transmit the same urgency to your kings.”

“That is a fantasy,” said Meijer. “As much as I may sympathize with your plight, I can’t give you false expectations. Our kings will retaliate against this rebellion.”

“Actually, no,” said Hana. “The liberation of slaves will be the last decree they’ll ever sign. After that, they must give up their thrones.”

Bolai spat on the floor. “That is an outrage!”

“No,” said Gilberto, “subjecting millions of people to lifetimes of exploitation is an outrage. It’s a regrettable consequence of colonial dominion that the proper meaning of words is also a victim.”

Hana proceeded to read, “Ranks of nobility will be annulled, aristocratic families will lose their privileges, and your governments will be ceded to assemblies of equal citizens.”

“You have no right to make that demand,” said Carvajal. “Our manner of government is none of your business, and the very suggestion of democracy—”

Gilberto cut him off, and his translator did the same to Carvajal’s. “Wrong. We have the right and the duty to save you from your mistakes. Your own citizens are victims of your system; it would be dishonest of us to seek our freedom and neglect yours. If we find abhorrent the idea that some people are below humanity, we must also refuse to acknowledge anyone above it. Monarchy is the reverse side of slavery, and it is just as repugnant.”

“My father will fight to the death before he’ll let you have his crown,” said Bolai. “And to get near him you’ll have to get past me, and every soldier in China, and every citizen in our capital.”

“Excuse me,” said Gilberto, his patience nearly gone, “did you just speak of the obliteration of the Forbidden City as if it were a rhetorical turn of phrase and not a trivially easy thing to do?”

The prince struggled to answer without showing fear. “Is Beijing hostage to your demand against the monarchy?”

“No, that one is for slavery,” Gilberto said with a smile. “This demand has different terms. Since your father still swears he’s Jesus incarnate, he should be able to use his miraculous powers to protect the holy Mount Sinai.”

The three men jumped to their feet. “God’s finger touched that mountain,” said Bolai.

For perhaps the first time in his life, Carvajal agreed with Chinese theology. “We won’t allow that sacrilege!”

“What you will do is return to your seats. We are issuing the same warning to any ruler who claims to speak for Heaven. The divine right of kings is rendered abolished.”

Carvajal was livid. “Heresy!”

Hana closed her eyes and took a deep breath. “Call it that if you will, but it won’t change the fact that you are the evildoers here.”

“If you meet our demands,” added Gilberto, “and prove that you can coexist with other states in peace, maybe one day we’ll show you how we summon demons.”

Ignoring Carvajal’s grimace, Meijer asked, “Do you mean we’re going to join your Alliance? Are we to become Survivor Peoples, like you?”

Hana shook her head. “You can’t claim that status. I mean, the preferable outcome is that you don’t oppose our demand for liberation and force us to use our magic against you. If that comes to pass, you’ll be considered Survivor Peoples, and we’ll work with you toward repairing the world together. What we’re offering today is a way for you to avoid taking that path.”

“This is the end of the natural order of things,” muttered Bolai.

“It’s nothing extraordinary,” said Gilberto. “You have to treat us with respect and start listening to your own people. Is that too much? All this time, you’ve forced us to debase ourselves and give up our future. What we are forcing you to do is to become better humans.”

“And you will dictate to us what is better?” asked Bolai. “What could you possibly know about ruling people? When did you have a chance to learn it?”

Meijer held up a hand to make the prince pause and asked, “I think his concern has to do with what, precisely, ‘better’ means according to you.”

Gilberto started to think of a reply for Meijer, but thought better of it and turned first to Bolai. “For the Great Ming, it means you’re going to stop treating your women and your children as less than people, and also, drop the pretense that your government is divinely ordained, because, to be honest, you’re making a joke of yourselves. For the Canutic Empire, it means you must grow out of this childish obsession with military power, and for the sake of all that is holy, stop darkening the sky. For Iberia, it means no more punishing people for their thoughts. You’re hurting yourselves. What you need is to learn science instead of trying to run a country on prayers; it makes you look like you actually enjoy catching the plague every year. And for the lot of you, it means you’re going to let us rule ourselves and manage our own resources without interference. For too long you’ve acted like parasites, convinced that you have the right to decide our lives for us. That ends now. From this moment, we are equals.”

“Hypocrites,” spat Carvajal. “You preach about fairness while you threaten to kill us.”

That was the argument Gilberto had been desperately hoping wouldn’t come. He’d spent months thinking of how to defeat it, how to justify behaving like the enemy. Each second that he kept his mouth open without providing an explanation added the weight of all the eyes of humanity gathered in that room looking at him, waiting. “I know what it’s like to be cornered,” he said at last. “It’s something no one should have to know, and I hate to do it to you, but if we don’t do this, you’re not going to stop. Unless you’re done killing us, in which case we’d love to hear it. Are you done killing us? Wouldn’t you like there to be some less horrible way for us to deal with each other? At some point you have to get tired of this, because Heaven knows we are.”

For a while, Carvajal appeared unwilling to answer. All of a sudden, he was possessed by a fit of laughter. He laughed uncontrollably at Gilberto, he laughed at the members assembled in the hall, and his laughter sounded more frightening than if he were firing cannons at them. When he regained control of himself, his face twisted back from its brief amusement and into a display of pure contempt. “You are just announcing your own empire, and all this talk is an excuse to conquer us.”

Astonished at his inability to reach him, Gilberto wished once more he knew what to say. “I feel sorry for you,” he heard Hana reply, and he silently thanked her for distilling his many contending thoughts into one statement. He took another look at Carvajal and saw a man imprisoned by his own upbringing. A pang of sadness shook him as he realized that the degradation inflicted on the survivor peoples had also tainted its perpetrators. Men who had lived like Carvajal or the king of Spain or the High Inquisitor couldn’t be made to see the world in terms different from those set by the cruelty around them. They had become so used to interpreting actions in terms of seeking advantage or gaining prestige that they no longer could recognize sincerity when met with it. Gilberto closed his eyes, searched in his heart for his dream of kindness between humans, and begged it to keep hope for an uncorrupted generation to take over from the ruling one. Then his attention returned to Hana, who was still making his point better than he could. “Live under our rules, and you’ll be surprised at how much freer you’ll be. As unbelievable as it may sound, we have no intention of imitating you. We do want a united world, but not under one banner. We are many. And if a future is to come that is different from the crushing evil we’re living in, it will be forged from the earnest efforts of the many.”

Epilogue

Daytime and Nighttime under Incessant Light, Equinox 1 (New Standard Calendar), First Year of Unity

South Pole City

Hundreds of feet of ice still remained beneath the city, but the newly renamed continent of Concordia wasn’t a forbidding destination anymore. With the continuous burning come to an end, the world no longer had an open wound, but it would always remain scarred. The south pole, now rather livable, provided the most symbolically and logistically adequate location for the permanent meeting place of humankind.

Forty-two-year-old delegate of the Esikongo Gilberto Rezende exited his house in the prefabricated neighborhood for diplomats and walked the distance to the offices of the still nascent world alliance under a pleasant sun. The building was an amalgamation of multiple styles, and Gilberto was proud of the part of it he had suggested. Between the ampleness of the main entrance with its luxurious water fountain and the busy interior with its hundreds of corridors and offices was a small domed passageway where the visitor could feel less overwhelmed by the immensity of the work that happened there. Gilberto had described it to the architects as a place for making a pause.

His pocket watch indicated that the workday had not yet begun, so he sat on one of the benches that surrounded the fountain and admired the white landscape beyond the city. It was said that, in the times before the heating of the world, even the farthest hills his sight could reach had been buried under a heavy blanket of thick snow. He looked down at the cement beneath his feet and tried to imagine how much hardened snow still separated him from the real ground. Choosing to build the city in the first place had been the material affirmation of a purpose: its precarious location, not on solid rock but on what only by the continuous effort of all peoples was kept from melting away, was meant as a reminder of the need for a common direction and for persistence in its pursuit.

“Good morning,” he heard behind his back in Spanish. “Or good whatever time it is here.”

He turned and saw Hana standing by the fountain. “Hana! It’s been years.” He embraced her and took a long look at her. “Where have you been? And when did you finish learning Spanish?”

“I was back home, in Rēkohu.” She sat next to him. “It’s something of a relief to see you. The Moriori tribal leaders have handed me so many responsibilities I can barely set aside any time to meet with a friend and just talk.”

Gilberto nodded. “Some days I forget what my own face looks like.”

“That can’t be true.” Hana turned to the fountain behind the bench. There’s a mirror right here under those gigantic windows of yours.”

“Don’t you have days when you don’t lift even your eyes off your desk?”

“Oh, I was wishing we wouldn’t talk about work. Independence has brought so much work, organizing the new government, adjudicating land rights, returning slaves to their families.”

“That sounds really impressive.”

“Yes.” She touched the water with her fingertips and found it tolerably cold. “Isn’t this supposed to shoot water up high?”

“It does, but they only turn it on during office hours.”

“Then I’ll wait. To answer your question: I picked up my Spanish while coordinating with the tribes in Encoberta. Mainly the Anmatyerre and their neighbors.”

“What are you working on?”

“We have a project to reconstruct precolonial history, and they’ve been great help; their mnemonic mapmaking techniques are second to none. Right now there’s an expedition around the Pacific islands to catalog medicinal plants.”

“I almost envy your duties,” he said with a chuckle.

People started arriving at the building; Gilberto only recognized the attire of half of them, and that increased his satisfaction with how things were turning out. The world was still inexhaustibly richer than he knew.

“I know; I shouldn’t be complaining. Who knows what keeps you busy, what with keeping the world in one piece.” They couldn’t resist laughing at their smallness in the stage of history and at the humbling significance of each baby step. “Lots of things are happening, and I can hardly keep track. Next month we’re receiving an engineer from the Han who’s going to teach us to build irrigation systems. It just never ends. I thought expelling our invaders would be the hard part.”

Gilberto nodded with resignation. “In Likasi we have dozens of old families we can’t send back to Lisbon because they’ve mixed with us; they’ve put down roots with us.”

Hana’s sigh came out as an exhausted cry. “I keep waiting for the moment we can jump into doing politics like a normal country, but the people who used to run the place when they had no business being there broke everything.”

“I can say the same for Zaire. And for the rest. We are learning the art of statecraft the hard, slow way.”

“It’s been worth the effort,” she said with a smile she hadn’t felt able to make for her entire life. “No more empires. No more colonies. No more subjects or slaves.”

He looked down, reluctant to share the full extent of her excitement. “I was in panic when we did it. We came dangerously close to losing the moral argument.”

“You can’t blame yourself for that. It was a rotten system; it was in its nature to damage anyone who was part of it.”

“But you can’t trace an obvious route from there to here. In one possible version of events, we launched the bomb, we found that we liked being in charge, and we lost sight of what we were trying to defend.”

She placed a hand on his shoulder. “I was there too. I wouldn’t have let you cross that line.”

That calmed him somewhat. “Thank you. It means a lot.”

“That’s the point of making allies. We make each other better.”

Gilberto consulted his pocket watch and looked up at the giant office windows. “I still regret that we had to resort to intimidation. But I keep thinking that if, due to some whim of fate, they had made peace with us out of their own good will, they’d spend the rest of history congratulating themselves and expecting our thanks. I doubt we would’ve owned that victory.”

Hana shifted positions on the bench and suddenly looked more serious. “The task of taking care of what we’ve won is what brings me here. I was fortunate to get some days just for myself, but next week I’ll start working with you.”

“Really? That’s great news! Are you still a delegate?”

“No. Now that the Alliance is dissolved and we’re making up this new thing here, we’re learning that there’s more to do than keep the peace. There’s talk of creating a division in charge of preserving cultural heritage. I’m supposed to help draft all the preliminary paperwork and, as they say, get things in motion.”

“You’re going to like it here. In my neighborhood we have restaurants with every type of food you can imagine.”

“What about you?”

“I’ve… been named Director of this new world alliance.”

They paused their conversation to bow their greetings at the approaching delegates from the Peruvian Federation, the Italian Union, and the Kurdish Republic.

“Now that is a surprise. I didn’t know we were going for a vertical hierarchy.”

That made Gilberto laugh out loud. “I’m not going to rule the world. But I will have a prettier chair at meetings. The position of Director will be rotated, of course.”

“But you’re going to be the first. You get to leave your mark.”

“A worthy one, I expect.”

“So, Director Rezende, what are you going to call this union of all the world’s states?”

“I’ve given thought to that. This alliance will belong to no one in particular. No one nation, no one language, no one faith. I’m giving it the obvious name.”

“Don’t disappoint me.”

“First let me explain. It’s always been meaningful to me that this unique opportunity for the world came because Neema discovered that two continents had the same rocks. I’ve kept that story as a reminder that we may be many, as you said, but the world is one.” Gilberto smiled. “I’m calling this alliance the United States.”

She mulled it over. “It’s boring. Bland. Generic. Unimaginative.”

“That’s why it’s the name we need. We must take care to not be tied to one region or one culture. The dream we’ve been fighting for is a space where it doesn’t matter where you come from or what you speak or what you look like. That’s the dream I call United States, and it must be open to the world. That’s what makes it different from all regimes that have existed until now.”

She glanced again at the building and couldn’t avoid feeling small again. “I can’t wait to see how you run this.”

“Today will be full of discussions. But I can’t function until I’ve had my coca tea.” The centuries-long embargo on coffee that the Portuguese had imposed on Abyssinia in retaliation for its fierce resistance to conquest was over, but in the meantime the habit of coca tea had irreversibly taken hold of the world. “Let’s get inside. Office hours must be starting about now.”

They walked past the main entrance and entered the part Gilberto had designed. The walls were nondescript, but above their heads the stones of the dome had inscriptions in hundreds of languages.

“What are we seeing here?”

“This is the welcoming area for visitors. Those engravings on the dome come from all over the world. Almost every nation contributed a slab of marble.”

“What’s carved on them?”

Gilberto stood under the center of the hall and extended his arms with a wide smile. “The highest principles of humanity. They’re all here.” He pointed at one near the southern wall. “That’s the Latin word for charity.” He turned her around so they looked at the opposite side of the hall. “That one’s from the Yamato. It means ‘reason for living’. And next to it you can see the Arabic word for peace.” He guided her gaze to a slab two rows above. “I can’t read Hopi, but I’m told their name means reverent harmony.” He recognized another one to his left. “Ah, that’s Chinese. I was here when they placed it; they said it means unconditional love. And that one’s from our friends the Semai; it’s their word for graciousness.” They turned again. “I forget where I saw the Mijikenda word for collaboration. They’re just so many. It always inspires me to walk through this passageway and know that all of humankind has sent us their good wishes, and that every culture already had a way to describe them. I’m sure somewhere here I saw a prayer in Hebrew that means to restore the world.” His eyes welled up as they went over the sacred stones. “I recognize the Sanskrit word for harmlessness, and the Greek word for excellence, and that one over there is a very complicated word in Isizulu that can be summarized as interconnectedness. When I asked for its translation, they gave me a whole speech and I was amazed that one little word could mean so much.” Hana pointed at a stone directly above her, and he searched in his mind until he recalled its meaning, “That’s ‘good sense’ in Catalan. Let me see… a diplomat told me this one here means ‘the good life’ in Kichwa, and over there you can see the Finnish word for perseverance.” He noticed one atop the door that led to the meeting hall, and his smile overflowed with joy. “I remember that one! It was sent by the Polish. I think they said it means ‘they will protect,’ but I’ll have to ask them again to be sure.”

When the wave of emotions receded, Gilberto opened the door to the inner part of the building and showed her the way upstairs. They entered the main meeting hall and marveled at its tall windows overlooking the snowy expanse. Outside, the fountain was just starting to shoot a modest stream that quickly gained height and was joined by a dozen others. For a moment they saw the façade of the building reflected on the pool, until the falling arc of the water jet unmade the image into numberless little ripples.

Author’s Note

This book was possible because my husband, Tucker Lieberman, gave me the material freedom to quit my job and pursue writing seriously. He also looked over every draft, made countless corrections to my English, and paid for the army of sensitivity readers who reviewed the final draft. We used the services of Salt & Sage Books.

I wrote this book during my undergraduate studies in creative writing in Bogotá, Colombia, and various teachers made contributions to my process. Ivonne Alonso did wonders showing me how to weave theme into plot. Liliana Moreno Acevedo figured what this story was about before I knew it myself. Eduardo Otálora taught me about the logic of characters’ choices. On the life and thought of Descartes, Rafael Rubio gave me more guidance than he’ll ever suspect.

My thanks extend outside the classroom. Kate Macdonald pointed out areas where the tone and the cast diversity could be improved. Rodrigo Bastidas critiqued an early version of Part 1 and helped solve consistency issues. Félix González provided specific and crucial worldbuilding advice for Part 3. Oren Ashkenazi made me see more clearly the thematic needs of the book and kept me from making a horrendous mistake in Part 7. Michael David Lukas examined the complete manuscript and showed me how to turn it into something presentable. Clay Harmon’s brief remarks of encouragement were an unexpected and welcome morale boost. Charlie Jane Anders and John Scalzi graciously allowed me to mention this novel on Twitter threads they initiated, which was more than I could have dreamed for. Paul Weimer helped spread the word and is surely to thank for several of my preorders. My father-in-law, Marc Lieberman, was an early reader of the finished draft and made supportive comments that I needed to hear during that stage of the process.

This novel was composed in the program YWriter, created by Simon Haynes. I wouldn’t have been able to keep the whole plot organized and logically interconnected without this program. Sometimes, our understanding of art overlooks the tools used in its construction, but one of the main factors that contributed to this novel surviving the travel out of my head and into the world was my good fortune in finding a tool designed by someone who understands what the craft needs.

All named characters in the prologue are historical. The plank bridge incident did occur, and chroniclers of the time tell us that about a hundred people fell into the Thames; somehow no one was hurt. Ours is the weirder timeline. Readers who wish to learn in more detail about the historical significance of William Adams should avoid the immensely popular but far too inventive Shōgun by James Clavell and read instead The Needle-Watcher by Richard Blaker. For a nonfictional treatment, Samurai William by Giles Milton is the best resource one could ask for. Since in my version of the timeline William dies before setting foot in Japan, no plot points were based on that book, but it did much to clarify my picture of the historical moment.

All named characters in Part 1 are historical except for Odahingum and the poor Father Martin. The changes I introduced to the flow of events caused the raid of Iceland to occur in 1620 instead of 1627. So, in my timeline, different people were captured, and thus different people wrote memoirs. In our timeline, Bridget Fuller and John Bradford did not marry each other. My main sources on the early history of the British colonies were The Peopling of British North America by Bernard Bailyn, A History of the American People by Paul Johnson, and The Destiny of Modern Societies by Milan Zafirovski. Although the Ottoman Empire features very little in this novel, The Turks in World History by Carter V. Findley was not without utility. About the lives of European slaves in Ottoman lands, White Slavery in the Barbary States by Charles Sumner is the canonical reference; I also consulted La Trata de Esclavos Cristianos by José Antonio Martínez Torres and White Gold by Giles Milton. A comprehensive description of the minutiae of maritime travel in the early modern age is Pasajeros de Indias by José Luis Martínez. For the scenes set around the Great Lakes, I relied on two sources by Francis Parkman: The Jesuits in North America in the Seventeenth Century and Pioneers of France in the New World. Unfortunately, complete and undistorted bibliography on the Ojibwe people is less abundant. Among many scattered sources, I resorted to the Encyclopedia of North American Indians edited by Frederick E. Hoxie. My crash course on the Venetian musical world was Cry to Heaven by Anne Rice, which I acknowledge to be risky, because a work of fiction is not a textbook, and I can only hope I exercised as much meticulous care with the topic as it requires. As luck would have it, my husband is a self-taught expert on the medical and cultural history of castration; his book Painting Dragons helped me design the character of Samuel Fuller, who in real life reached North America with the rest of the Puritans. The Mayflower’s travel log and the writings of its more illustrious passengers are readily available on the public domain, but nothing beats interviewing real people. The Plimoth Patuxet in Massachusetts is an open-air museum with performers in period costume reenacting with impressive fidelity the lives of the Puritans once they were settled in North America. My husband took me there in the summer of 2017 so I could get a better idea of the mindset of a generation that now feels alien.

All named characters in Part 2 are historical. The phase of the moon on the mentioned date was computed with the program Celestia. The trippy dream sequence did happen, albeit with different imagery in our timeline, and is currently hypothesized to have been an episode of exploding head syndrome (a real neurological condition that is less icky than its name suggests). The fight on the boat also happened, although the real date is uncertain. Of course, in our timeline Descartes managed to react in time to prevent his murder. Most of my information about the flavor of this era derives from The Crisis of the 17th Century by Hugh Trevor-Roper.

All named characters in Part 3 are historical. Kristina of Sweden held, in fact, the title of King, and her incredible life is worth a hundred books. The invention of the submarine did happen as described, but its military potential was left unexplored until the 20th century. As I said, ours is the weirder timeline. The excellent North West to Hudson Bay by Thorkild Hansen provided the bulk of my information on the life of Jens Munk, and I have Felipe López to thank for tracking down that book for me. If you ever visit Bogotá, go to his bookstore Mirabilia for the best selection of science fiction to be found anywhere in Colombia. Say hi from me.

All named characters in Part 4 are historical except for Xiaobo. Her peculiar fighting style is Ground Dog Kung Fu, which was devised in the province of Fujian for the specific training of women disabled by foot binding. My data on the tradition of binding (and the no less painful practice of unbinding) came from Cinderella’s Sisters by Dorothy Ko. The man I called Emperor Zhenzui is the same man who in our timeline took the regnal name Chongzhen. My main source on the evangelization of Asia was Tras el Sueño de China by José Antonio Cervera. For information on the first diplomatic contacts between Japan and Europe, I consulted Historia de un Desencuentro by Emilio Sola and the doctoral thesis La Cruz y la Catana by Ainhoa Reyes Manzano. In 1992, the City Archive of Seville published a reprint of a chronicle written in 1862 about the diplomatic delegation that Hasekura Tsunenaga had led there two and a half centuries earlier. It’s a tiny book, but it constituted a priceless source on this tragic character. In China, Flemish missionary Ferdinand Verbiest really invented the first modern version of the steam engine as a gift to the emperor (a different emperor in our timeline), but the contraption was thought of as no more than a toy, and it never found its obvious applications. I’ll say it again: ours is the weirder timeline.

All named characters (and earthquakes) in Part 5 are historical. As I deviated more and more from events in real life, historical references started to prove less and less useful. It is true that Bartolomeu de Gusmão drew a model for an airship, but aerodynamically it made little sense. Worse still, it was based on the previous work of Francesco Lana de Terzi, who had planned to obtain buoyance by making a vacuum inside metallic spheres, a technological feat that even to us would be challenging; at least Gusmão’s more birdlike design had the advantage of not being completely impractical. The positions of the planets on the mentioned date were computed with the program Celestia. Those who wish to know more about the 1755 earthquake are advised to read This Gulf of Fire by Mark Molesky.

In Part 6, Professor Hiriyanna and his family are historical figures placed in completely different circumstances, as are Sagunabai Kshirsagar and Paulo Farnana. In real life, Professor Hiriyanna wrote numerous treatises on Indian philosophy that even the general reader will benefit from. Neema and all the other characters are fictional. The historical version of Paulo was named Paul Panda Farnana M’Fumu; whereas my timeline gives Zaire to the Portuguese, the real place was the much more dystopian Belgian Congo, and Paul’s life story is a fascinating example of what a world-class education can do for colonized peoples when unhindered by racist prejudice. Professor Hiriyanna’s friend Hariram is based on an actual printer who lived at that time, named Hariram Mishra, who ran a publishing house of certain importance in Bengaluru. Shashi Tharoor’s An Era of Darkness (known in the West as Inglorious Empire) describes a colonial India very different from the one depicted here, but it taught me much about the modus operandi of imperial oppression. His book Why I Am a Hindu provided insights that went into the crafting of adult Rukkamma’s personality. In the state of Karnataka, Mysuru (called here by its old endonym Mahisūru) is a delightful little town where the traveler gets a respite from the agitation of India’s bigger cities. Thanks again to my husband, I spent some days there in the winter of 2019 to take notes on the climate and the flow of life. In our timeline, Congolese uranium was used in the Manhattan Project.

All characters in Part 7 and the epilogue are fictional, but the highest principles of humanity are true in all possible worlds. All the tribes mentioned are historical (even if a handful of them have gone extinct in our world). I made my best effort to research their proper endonyms in order to avoid calling them by a colonial name or their neighbors’ pejorative for them. About the meaning of the United States as an ideal, Dreaming Up America by Russell Banks is a good starting point. For first-hand testimonies of the many ways the actual country has fallen short of that ideal, I recommend Extremo Occidente by Juan Carlos Castillón Martín and The Wordy Shipmates by Sarah Vowell.

All locations in the book exist in our world. The city of Munkhaven is in the same place where we have Churchill, Manitoba. We haven’t built an extranational city at the South Pole, but someone should.

Putting a historical novel together used to be infinitely harder in predigital times. The blogs Writing with Color and Mythcreants are wonderful sources on the respectful handling of multicultural settings, narratives about oppression, and wordcraft in general. A myriad of tiny tasks, like looking up the spelling of a name, untangling a royal bloodline, keeping track of simultaneous events recorded in different calendars, calculating travel distances, purging anachronistic vocabulary, describing a society’s technological state, or predicting the effects of global warming, were only possible thanks to the nearly forty million volunteer authors of the English Wikipedia. I feel like Gilberto under the dome when I consider how much I depended on the collected knowledge of humankind to finish this book.

My learning of the writing craft owes a perpetual debt to Sarum by Edward Rutherfurd, The Pillars of the Earth by Ken Follett, and particularly for the structure of this book, Unsong by Scott Alexander and The Years of Rice and Salt by Kim Stanley Robinson. If you liked what I did here, go look for those novels, which are immeasurably superior at putting a story together and maintaining it over a long timescale. They are the grandparents of this book. I remain their grateful student.

Copyright

This book tells events that never happened in reality, but events that never happened in reality can nonetheless carry truth.

©2021 Arturo Serrano

Cover image by superemelka from Pixabay

Content

Arturo Serrano
TO CLIMATES UNKNOWN
AN ALTERNATE HISTORY OF A WORLD WITHOUT AMERICA

Prologue

Part 1: Drift

Part 2: Setback

Part 3: Descent

Part 4: Turn

Part 5: Leap

Part 6: Spread

Part 7: Collision

Epilogue

Author’s Note

Copyright