Saint Antony's Fire Read online

  All at once, he laughed uncontrollably. When he'd gotten his breath back, something compelled him to address the unearthly being as though it had been alive.

  "Well, demon, or whatever you are, I've entered your realm, and you couldn't frighten me off. So you've learned something about the men of Spain! And while I may not have gained anything else—in fact, I'm sure I haven't, for this has been a fool's errand like all the rest of this expedition—I claim your crown, by right of conquest!"

  He set down his weapons, removed his morion, and took the circlet in his hands. It was lighter than it looked. He placed it on his graying head.

  All at once, his soul was no longer his own.

  It wasn't that he no longer had a soul. That might almost have been better than this total inability to resist the great roaring voice inside his skull, all the while knowing he couldn't resist it. For a moment, his eyes met the enormous empty eye-sockets of the dead being . . . and he knew.

  He knew what he must do. And he knew that the first of the things he must do was also his reward. And if his soul had still been his own, he would not have accepted that reward. He would have rejected it as the very breath of Satan. This, too, he knew. And that was the measure of his damnation.

  He walked to the strange pool-that-was-not-a-pool and lay down in its weirdly swirling depths. And then he learned that there were even worse things than having no will. This penetrated not just his mind, but . . . what was the name of that pagan Greek philosopher who had postulated infinitesimal particles of which everything was ultimately composed? Oh, yes, Democritus . . .

  Then his consciousness mercifully fled—the first mercy that had been vouchsafed him. And the last.

  They waited, tormented by insects and tension, snarling at each other at the least provocation, or no provocation at all. As night approached and their patience began to stretch to the snapping point, Juan González Ponce de León prepared to call for volunteers to accompany him through that eerie portal in search of his father.

  But at that moment, the figure of the captain-general appeared. With shouts of joy, they crowded around the ramp . . . and stopped.

  If asked, they wouldn't have been able to explain what it was that halted them in their tracks. It was undeniably Ponce de León, looking no different . . . at least in any way they could have put a name to. But there was something different. Perhaps it was something in the way he moved, like a younger man. Or perhaps it was the expression on his face, as though it was someone else looking out through his eyes. Someone they weren't sure they knew, or wanted to know.

  "Father . . . ?" Juan González spoke hesitantly into the silence.

  Ponce de León laughed—and it wasn't really his laugh. "Have no fear, son, for we are not in the presence of the powers of darkness. Tomorrow, I'll show you all! And . . . I will found a church here, in thanks to God for His blessing!" He blinked, and all at once was almost as he had been—not quite, but close enough to allow them a feeling of relief. "But now we must return to the ships before nightfall." He led the way with a spring in his step that none of them had seen in quite a while.

  But Juan Garrido lingered behind, held by the curiosity that his friends had always said would be the death of him. After the last of them had vanished into the woods, he looked around furtively, darted up the ramp, and entered the portal.

  His comrades heard his soul-shaking scream of ultimate horror and despair behind them, and the noise as he ran with reckless speed through the underbrush. By the time they caught up with him, it was too late. He lay face down in a pool of blood, still clutching the dagger with which he had cut his own throat.

  One

  Don Alonzo Pérez de Guzmán El Bueno, Duke of Medina Sidonia and Captain General of the High Seas, had finally gotten over being seasick.

  Some would say it's about time, he reflected ruefully. After all, he was commander of the greatest war fleet in history—the Armada of a hundred and thirty ships and thirty thousand men assembled by His Most Catholic Majesty Phillip II for the conquest of England and the restoration of the true Catholic faith to that benighted land.

  His chronic seasickness was only one of the arguments he had used in his letter to the King, seeking to decline the appointment to replace the Armada's original commander Don Alvaro de Bazán, Marquis of Santa Cruz—who, some whispered, had been hastened into a not altogether unwelcome grave by the King's constant carping. In retrospect, he realized that letter had been a mistake. He should have slept on it, instead of instantly sitting down and penning a spate of self-deprecation. In particular, he should have known better than to plead inability to spend the lavish amounts a fleet commander was expected to contribute to an expedition out of his private purse. Coming from one of the greatest private landholders in Europe, a plea of poverty had been so patently spurious as to weaken the rest of his case, every word of which happened to be true.

  Afterwards, realizing all this, he had pulled himself together and written a second letter stating forthrightly his real reason for not wanting the stupendous honor of commanding the Armada: the fact that he had no faith it could succeed.

  Neither letter had had the slightest effect, of course. He knew full well the King's reasons for appointing him. First and foremost, he was the senior grandee of all Spain, inhabiting a stratum far above jealousy. None of the proud, touchy aristocrats who commanded the Armada's squadrons could possibly take offense at being called on to serve under him. Furthermore, in his capacity as hereditary Captain General of Andalusia he had directed the defense of Cadiz the previous year when the English pirate Sir Francis Drake had attacked it . . . and subsequently withdrawn, leaving the town unsacked. So the claim could be made that he had repelled el Draque, whose name Spanish nursemaids used to frighten naughty children. Nonsense, of course; Drake had simply sailed away as soon as he had done what he had come to do and set the Armada's schedule back by a year. It sounded good, though. And so his two letters had been wastes of paper and ink. The King had peremptorily ordered him to Lisbon to lead the Armada to what he had been practically certain was its doom.

  The King had assured him otherwise. After all, the Armada sailed in God's cause, and therefore could not fail. And besides, one of the Gray Monks of the Order of Saint Antony was to accompany it, with certain equipment which was to be loaded aboard in the strictest secrecy.

  The last had not reassured him as he knew it should have.

  Partly, as he admitted to himself, his reservations were a matter of his family background. The Guzmáns had a tradition of enmity with the Ponce de Leóns, including old Juan, who had gone to his grave claiming to have discovered the fountain of youth in 1513. Admittedly, that grave had been an extraordinarily postponed one. But toward the end, his behavior had increasingly aroused almost as much comment as his lack of visible signs of aging. And the manner of his death, when it finally came, had occasioned whispered stories that no one wanted to believe. Equally disturbing had been the stories that had begun to filter back from the church he had established on the site. Shortly after its founding in 1540, the Society of Jesus had been directed to investigate the matter. The Jesuits sent to Florida had returned to Spain with a small, heavily cloaked figure, and petitioned the Church to found a new monastic order named after Saint Antony of Padua, the thirteenth century Franciscan known in his lifetime as "the hammer of the heretics." After a private audience, still shrouded in secrecy, the Holy Father had granted the request.

  But it was more than just the Ponce De León connection—more than just a family feud. It was the Gray Monks themselves, who were appearing in Europe in increasing numbers . . .

  It was at that moment that the door to a certain cabin creaked open for the first time since they had left Corunna.

  Medina Sidonia swung about, startled. The Gray Monk stood outside the door, with a pair of his human acolytes emerging behind him.

  No, the Duke told himself sternly, setting himself a penance for the mental qualifier "human." The Gray Monks
were human. They must be. Had not the Holy Father said so? After emerging from that private audience about which strange things were still muttered furtively, Pope Paul III had decreed that the man the Jesuits had brought back from Florida had indeed been just that: a man, possessing a soul. And if he looked peculiar . . . well, so did Indians or Africans.

  And yet, the Duke could not stop himself from guiltily thinking, it's not the same. Indians and Africans might be ugly, but they were clearly of the moist, sweaty flesh of Adam. The Gray Monks' flesh didn't seem like flesh at all—dry, pale gray, unpleasantly thin-seeming. And the huge eyes were bottomless pools of undifferentiated darkness, utterly unlike those of any breed of men . . . or, for that matter, any beast. And the nose was an almost nonexistent ridge. And the mouth was a tiny lipless slit above the pointed chin. And then there were those disturbing hands . . .

  No, he thought again, setting himself an additional penance. The Holy Father had spoken. For any good Catholic, that settled the matter.

  "Father Jerónimo," he said, inclining his head with his customary grave courtesy.

  "My son," acknowledged the Gray Monk in the sibilant way they always spoke, unpleasantly reminiscent of the hissing of snakes, as though they were forming human words without human organs of speech. He returned the nod, then looked up to meet the Duke's eyes. He had to look up. Medina Sidonia was not a tall man, but none of the Gray Monks stood much above four and a half feet. "You appear distracted."

  "It is nothing you need concern yourself with, Father. Only a problem of navigation, and other such lowly matters."

  "Ah, but anything that touches on the success of this Armada is my concern. After all, we sail in the service of God." It was impossible to read expressions on that face, and the unnatural, whispering voice seemed devoid of emotion. But the Duke could have sworn he detected a strangely inappropriate note of amused irony in the last sentence. "Besides," Father Jerónimo continued, "the King has commanded you to keep me informed of all developments."

  This, the Duke knew, was true. His orders had included instructions concerning the Gray Monk which were strangely at variance with King Phillip's usual nit-picking passion for detail. In fact, they went beyond the instruction that had commanded him to follow the advice of Don Diego Flores de Valdés on the nautical matters of which he himself freely admitted he had no practical experience. These orders were open-ended, effectively making the Gray Monk the Armada's co-commander. He was to defer to the advice of Father Jerónimo in all matters in which the Gray Monk chose to interest himself. So far, these had proven to be no matters at all, which had enabled the unwelcome orders to recede into the background of the Duke's thoughts. But now the Gray Monk had emerged from seclusion, and the orders could no longer be ignored.

  And besides, the Duke thought to himself in a sudden spasm of self-knowledge, he needed to vent his frustration and despair to someone, on this Saturday afternoon, the sixth of August, anno Domini 1588, when for the first time he knew beyond any possibility of self-deception that the Armada was going to fail, and that it had been doomed to failure from the first.

  He abruptly turned away and walked across the quarterdeck of the flagship San Martín. Father Jerónimo followed, and bystanders nervously moved aside at the sight of him. He joined the Duke at starboard rail, and the two of them stared ahead at the coast of France, for they were only a few miles from Calais. Astern, the city of hulls and forest of masts that was the Armada blocked their view of the English ships that followed so inescapably.

  "You know my mission," the Duke began, speaking as much to himself as to the Gray Monk, "for you were present at the council back in Lisbon where the King's orders were opened. I am to take the Armada up the English Channel and join with the Duke of Parma, clearing the sea of the English fleet so that he can cross over from the Netherlands with his army, reinforced by six thousand of the troops I've brought from Spain." Crammed into every cubic yard of dark airless below-decks space, he thought, many of them seasick or with diarrhea. He could often smell the nauseating, indescribable filth of their quarters up here on the weather decks. And their vomit and excreta seeped further down, through the storage holds containing the food they had to eat, and still further down into the bilges they lived atop. "Well, for the last several days I have known that I cannot accomplish the second part of those orders. The English ships are so much more nimble than ours that they can always keep the weather gauge, as the mariners call it. They can fight or avoid battle at their pleasure, bombarding us with the long-range culverins they have in far greater numbers than we, never allowing us to come alongside and board them as our soldiers wish."

  "Still, you have fought your way up the Channel valiantly, suffering relatively small loss."

  "Oh, yes. As long as we maintain our defensive formation, they can only nibble at its edges. But that makes us even less maneuverable, for we must keep formation with the worst tubs among the merchant ships the King collected to serve as troop carriers. We can't touch the English!" For a moment the Duke was unable to continue, choked by weariness and frustration. "No. I cannot clear the seas for Parma."

  "Of course you can't, my son. Santa Cruz couldn't have. No one could have."

  The Duke looked up sharply and met those strange eyes. As always, he could not read them. And he sternly ordered himself not to feel vindication at the Gray Monk's reference to the revered sea-fighter Santa Cruz, whose shoes the King had impossibly ordered him to fill. Anyway, the feeling only lasted an instant before black despair closed in over him again.

  "Your words are a comfort, Father. But early this afternoon I learned that I can't fulfill the first part of my orders either. I can't join hands with the Duke of Parma as the King commands!"

  "What do you mean, my son?" As before, the Duke distrusted his instincts in interpreting that expressionless voice. But was there a hint of mockery?

  A moment passed before the Duke replied. He was running over in his mind the sequence of events that had brought the Armada to its present pass.

  Their route from Lisbon had taken them out of sight of land only once, when they had crossed the Bay of Biscay from Corunna to the Lizard. So the voyage had never required deep-sea navigation. Instead, it had all been a matter of coastal pilotage, or "caping"—making one's way from cape to cape with the aid of the books of sailing instructions the French called routiers, a word which the English had bastardized into "rutters" in their usual way of plundering other peoples' languages. And the Armada carried the most advanced pilot's tool of all: the atlas of sea-charts and rutters compiled by the Dutchman Wagenhaer. ("Waggoner," in another typical English bit of linguistic brigandage.) All this the Duke had learned, trying to remedy his inexperience of the sea in preparation for his unwelcome task. But there was one thing he had not learned until this very day. And now he poured it forth to the Gray Monk because in his distress of soul he must pour it forth to someone. Wasn't that what a man of God was for . . . even when he was this sort of man?

  "At ten o'clock this morning, we sighted the French coast, after having edged away from the English side of the Channel yesterday." Until then, they had hugged that side, on the express orders of the King. He had expected the sight of the Armada to ignite a rising of the English Catholics against the heretic bastard Elizabeth, for so he had been assured by English exiles who made their living by telling him what he wanted to hear. In fact, the only result had been to force the Armada to fight within sight of ports from which its enemies could be readily resupplied, while its own stocks of powder and shot ran lower and lower. "I have continually sent pinnaces to the Duke of Parma with letters urging him to be ready to meet us when we come within sight of his port of Dunkirk, although I have received no reply. But then, at four o'clock this afternoon, as we were already approaching Calais, the pilots informed me that they can't take us there! As Wagenhaer explains, there is a series of sandbanks running parallel to the Flemish coast, less than three fathoms deep—and extending twelve miles out to sea off Du
nkirk. Ocean-going ships like ours can't approach closer than that."

  "Only now they tell you this? But surely there must be a way through the banks."

  "Only one very narrow channel. Wagenhaer warns that it is death to try to bring deep-draft ships though it without an experienced Flemish pilot. And we have none." The Duke mastered himself and continued. "So we can't fetch Parma's army as planned. The only hope is for him to come out and meet us. When I met with my council of war, most of them were for pressing on to Dunkirk anyway—they simply couldn't believe it!"

  "Understandable." The note of irony in the Gray Monk's strange voice was now unmistakable. "But you overruled them?"

  "Yes. I've given orders for us to anchor four miles short of Calais. We'll be there soon. Maybe the wind and tide will carry the English on past us before they see what we're doing and can drop anchor, so they'll lose the weather gauge." Even as he said it, he knew he didn't really believe it. And Father Jerónimo didn't even bother to comment. "I'll continue to send messages to Parma. I've already asked him to send us armed fly-boats—the light, handy, flat-bottomed vessels that are the only warships that can maneuver in the Dutch shallows. Now it becomes imperative that he do so, and use the rest of his fly-boats to bring his army out."