Navigator

I

There was much excitement around the harbour of Palos this August morning. The place was crowded with curious Christians, many still wearing their crusader shoulder flashes, and with Jews desperate to flee a country that had rejected them.

Harry and Geoffrey walked a good distance, pushing through the crowds, trying to get a glimpse of the explorers. In the end they climbed a steep slope, just outside the town, from which they could see the harbour and the three ships it cradled.

It was a modest fleet. There were the two caravels, called the Pinta and the Santa Clara, the latter more commonly known as the Nina after its owner, a man called Juan Nino. And there was the one larger carrack called the Santa Maria, but often called La Gallega as it had been built in Galicia. The Santa Maria carried square sails on a foremast and mainmast, and a triangular lateen sail on a mizzenmast at the rear. The Pinta was rigged like the Santa Maria, but the Nina relied on lateen sails. The two caravels especially were graceful, slim little ships.

In these last minutes before they cast off Harry could see the figures of the crew loading their ships, bustling around the decks and the stout castles at prow and stern. The men looked somehow too large for their ships, which were only some fifty or sixty feet long; they were terribly tiny ships to challenge a world ocean. Harry remembered Abdul telling him that the rudders on some Chinese vessels were almost the size of a ship like the Nina.

And yet it was not the Chinese who sailed today, but Cristobal Colon.

'Modest they may be, yes,' Geoffrey said, when Harry voiced these thoughts. 'But look at them, Harry, bristling in the water, full of purpose. Henry the Navigator would be proud to see the day – even if they are Spanish ships sailing from a Spanish port.'

'It's turning out to be quite a year for Cristobal,' Harry said.

'Quite a year for Spain!'

The door to Colon's ocean adventure had finally opened in November of last year, when Boabdil, the last emir of al-Andalus, signed a treaty of surrender. On 6 January 1492, the monarchs themselves entered Granada. They were dressed respectfully in the Moorish style, Isabel radiant in a turban and an embroidered caftan, but the sweet voices of the royal choir sang hymns to Christ, which echoed through the empty stone streets. It was a tremendous victory for Christendom, the conclusion of eight centuries of dedicated reconquest, and the news of it rang out across Europe.

And in April Colon was summoned to the monarchs' court once more. The monarchs received him in the Alhambra itself, in a chamber the Moors had called the Hall of the Mexuar, a room in the oldest part of the palace where the daylight was filtered through the stained glass of a lantern roof. In this architectural triumph of a vanquished people, amid rooms inscribed with Moorish slogans – Wa la ghalib illa Allah, there is no conqueror but Allah – Colon's contract documents were sealed. He was given a letter from Fernando and Isabel to the Great Khan of the Mongols. And as a final flourish Colon begged the monarchs to devote all the treasure raised by his expedition to the reconquest of Jerusalem.

But Colon would not be able to sail from Seville or Malaga, for those great ports were choked with fleeing Jews.

He headed for little Palos on the Tinto estuary instead; Colon was glad to honour the town where he had found such support from the brothers of La Rabida. But on the road Colon was caught up in great chains of refugees, more Jews, struggling to get to the coast. Some of them carried shards of the shattered tombstones of their ancestors. They were dusty, exhausted, ill; some helpless mothers even gave birth on the road. But their rabbis made the women sing and play tambourines to raise the people's spirits. And even when Colon reached Palos he had trouble securing ships, for all the masters were busy with the urgent task of transporting Jews.

Just at this moment when it was preparing to reach out across the world, Spain was cleansing itself.

Geoffrey said, 'What a terrible mistake the expulsion could prove to be! Torquemada's bitter heart may be brimming. But Spain is stripping herself of her most industrious citizens – of a whole class of bankers and moneylenders, artists and administrators; no hidalgo or caballero would lower himself to such work. Just as she is on the verge of empire, Spain is ridding herself of the talents she needs to run it. Ha!

'And the Moors will surely follow the Jews out of Spain sooner or later, whatever promises the monarchs have made. What will become of the Moors I don't know, for though their ancestors came from the deserts of Africa and Araby, they don't belong there now any more than you or I would have a place in the German forests of our own forebears. Perhaps they will simply dissipate, a vanished people, leaving behind their palaces and books, and the future will wonder that a Muslim nation once flourished in western Europe…'

Harry had had enough of the grand sweep of history. 'Well, all I want is to get back to my own life,' he said firmly. 'I'm thirty-six years old now, brother, and feeling it. I have spent too long on the past; I want to think of the future. If I can find a wife, have some children-'

'Good for you.'

'And I want to get back to trade. If there's profit to be made from this adventure, I want a share in generating it – and spending it. The Spanish aren't the only explorers. I have been corresponding with an Italian adventurer called Jacobo Caboto who is going to approach King Henry with a proposal to try to find a route to Asia through the northern seas, following in the wake of the long-dead Vikings.'

Geoffrey grunted. 'Perhaps you will find Vinland, if not China.'

'And what next for you, Geoffrey?'

Geoffrey thought, tugging at his lip. 'I have been contemplating this muddy business we have been involved in. I want to do something about it. We have been at the focus of a battle between two time-meddling agents, the Weaver who fed the designs of the Engines of God back to Aethelred and Aethelmaer, and the Witness who spoke to Eadgyth.

'And there is evidence of other tampering, Harry. Your remote ancestor Sihtric, dead four centuries, made marginal notes on his copy of the Engine Codex. He believed he had found evidence that the Weaver, or another agent, tried to avert the course of the Norman Conquest of England. And even earlier, in the deep and ancient days when the Romans ruled Britain, another meddler, or the same one, tried to arrange the assassination of the Emperor Constantine. I have tried to map all this.'

He produced a parchment on which he had scribbled a kind of tapestry. He explained that the long warp threads were the true course of history, the wefts the deflections of history, or attempted deflections – he had found no less than six of them, from the failed assassination of Constantine to the amulet of Bohemond which resulted in the murder of the Mongol Khan.

Harry gaped. 'That's astonishing.'

'Yet it seems to be true. But after all this meddling, what is left? What is true, what is right? What should our destiny be? The tapestry of time, rent apart and rewoven over and over, has become a shabby, worthless rag.'

'And you're thinking of doing something about it?'

Geoffrey's gaze was distant. 'What if I could speak to a Weaver of my own, off in some future time? I don't know how – perhaps I will write and speak and have my words printed up in a thousand copies, so that they never die. Or perhaps I will simply take my testament to my grave, and one day, when my body is exhumed, my words will rise with me.'

'What will you say?'

'I will ask for help. I will ask that these meddlers, the Weavers and the Witnesses and the whole pack of them, be halted from their tampering with time's tapestry. That an end be put to it, and history be allowed to resume its proper course.'

Harry looked around the world, at the huge blue sky of Spain, the shoulders of the land around the harbour, the endless shimmering sea. He felt the heat of the sun on his neck, smelled the ocean salt, heard the cry of seabirds who wheeled far above. It was all so vivid, so specific, so real, that it seemed impossible to him that it could all be changed on a whim.

But of all the elements in the pretty panorama before him, the most vivid and exciting were the brave forms of Colon's three ships.

At last the ships cast off, to distant cheers from the crowds who thronged the harbour. They put out to sea towed by launches, but soon their sails billowed with the offshore wind, and they surged into the waters of the Ocean Sea, the cross of Christ bright red on their sails.

'He has gone,' Harry said.

'Yes. In this moment it changes,' Geoffrey murmured. 'If Colon is right, perhaps this is the moment when Christendom will win a world, and will never again be threatened, its destiny never again subject to the whim of history, a battle turned, a ruler dying. Certainly the dark future warned of by Eadgyth's Witness has vanished, like so many others: whole histories that never existed, and never will exist. Millions of lives, generations of men and women living and loving, fighting and dying, marching off into the future like legions – all of them wiped out!'

Harry said, 'But after all this, Geoffrey, as Colon sails, has the world changed for the better, or worse?'

'I doubt if even the Lord God would answer that with confidence, my friend.'

They watched until the three fragile ships, pressing ever west, disappeared over the curve of the round world. Harry felt as if a nightmare that had plagued him since his father's death was at last sailing out of his head.

Then, thirsty for wine, they made their way back down the slope and into the town.