“How long will it last?” Holliday yelled into the Portuguese captain’s ear.
“At least through the night, perhaps longer,” he answered. “There is no point in making for Corvo; the harbor at Flores is a better choice.”
“You’re the captain,” said Holliday. “Whatever you say.”
Tavares nodded and spun the wheel. They turned a little further west, away from their goal. An hour later Flores came in sight, and an hour after that the San Pedro reached the tiny harbor of Santa Cruz das Flores, a single concrete pier in the lee of a tiny village huddled at the base of a battery of rugged hills.
The buildings of the village were rough lava stone mortared together and topped with the standard Portuguese style terra-cotta tiles. They found a restaurant in the town square and had a meal of octopus stewed in wine, rabbit stew, and fresh-baked bread and creamery butter.
After the meal Tavares disappeared for a few minutes, returning with an elderly man in tow whom he introduced as Dr. Emilio Silva. Dr. Silva wore enormous rubber boots, a completely transparent raincoat, and what appeared to be a very old-fashioned military uniform underneath.
He smoked a long, fuming clay pipe and appeared to be heading toward a hundred years of age, his face a wrinkled map of a long, arduous life. His eyes were clear, however, and when he spoke his voice, though as wispy and cracked as his face, was firm and coherent. According to Tavares the doctor had lived in the islands all of his life, and anyone or anything he didn’t know wasn’t worth knowing.
He told the story of the statue and the coins, again with Tavares as his translator. The man’s name was Damien de Goes, not Gao as Tavares had thought, and the statue had been of a bareheaded “Moorish” man-presumably black or at least swarthy-wearing a cape and seated on a horse, his right arm raised and pointing to the west. At his feet there had been a cauldron or kettle containing a hoard of treasure including five bronze and two gold coins from Cyrene in North Africa and from the Phoenician colony of Carthage, now modern Tunisia. Remarkably detailed for a myth or an old wives’ tale.
As the old man recounted the story, Holliday remembered an old map he’d once seen in a museum drawn by the Pizzigano brothers, a team of cartographers working in the early 1300’s-long before the Azores had actually been discovered and almost two hundred years before Columbus.
The Pizzigano brothers, illustrating an ancient Phoenician myth, showed a man on horseback at the edge of their map, just about where the Azores would be located. The man was pointing westward, and a medallion at his feet warned that anyone venturing further would be swallowed up in “The Sea of Fog and Darkness”-not a bad description of the North Atlantic when it was in bad humor.
Interestingly the same “sea of fog and darkness” term had once been used by a Moorish Muslim cartographer in Spain named Khashkhash ibn Saeed ibn Aswad to describe a voyage made in the ninth century-a full five hundred years before Columbus. Even the name of the place where the statue had been found on the island of Corvo rang true: Ponta do Marco-the boundary marker-go no further. X marks the spot.
“He says,” said Tavares, continuing to translate, “that there is a man on Corvo who we should see if we have any more questions.” He turned to the old man again. “Como o senhor te chama?” What is his name?
“Rodrigues,” said the old man clearly, his yellow teeth clamped around the stem of the long clay pipe. “Helder Rodrigues. Clerigo.”
“A priest,” said Tavares. “He says the man you should see is a priest.”
30
Capitano Tavares ferried them across to Corvo the following morning. The day was moody, the skies full of broken clouds that scudded low on the horizon over a choppy, restless sea. The San Pedro slapped the small waves sullenly, the movement jarring. Corvo was visible from the time they rounded the breakwater at Santa Cruz das Flores. It stood like a massive cupcake, one side slumped in the pan, a single volcanic cone worn by a million years of winds and storms, shouldering its way through the eons, the fire that had created it long since cooled, the steep slopes covered with a thick carpet of greenery, its giant cliffs like the massive bow of an ancient ship.
Barely fifteen miles separated Flores from its smaller sister; the voyage in the San Pedro lasted barely forty minutes. The town of Corvo clung to the sloped, southernmost portion of the island, a scattering of red-tile-roofed houses wedged in around a straight concrete pier with no breakwater.
Instead of docking, Tavares guided the old Chris-Craft north, following the steep coastline away from the town.
“Where are we going?” Peggy asked as the town receded in their wake.
“Around the island. A few minutes only. I show you Ponta do Marco. End of the world.”
They continued northward, the coast steepening to dark, plunging cliffs of volcanic basalt, the sea breaking in huge shuddering waves at the bottom. There was no middle ground, not even a rocky beach. There was the sea, and then there was the land, an irresistible force meeting an immovable object, one trying to wear down the other in a never-ending battle that had already lasted millions of years.
Holliday thought about the sword and the man who might have carried it. Was this his destination? Was this lonely island in the middle of an even lone lier sea the final resting place of the great treasure that had been hidden since the time of Christ beneath the Temple of Solomon in the holy city of Jerusalem? Or had it all been nothing more than a story, a fancy like King Arthur and his sword, Excalibur?
Standing there, feet braced against the rocking of the boat, it occurred to Holliday that perhaps it didn’t matter. The sword, the story behind it, and the long journey were enough to have changed and molded events and men’s lives across two thousand years, and a story told that long and with that effect had to have some meaning behind it. Arthur and Excalibur may well have been nothing but childish myth, but it was a myth that had moved millions and changed lives.
“You’ve got that thousand-mile-stare expression on your face, Doc,” said Peggy, standing at his side. She smiled fondly at him. “Looking into history again?”
“Something like that,” he nodded.
Tavares spun the wheel, and the San Pedro heeled over slightly as they turned around a rocky headland. He pointed.
“There!” he said. “Ponta do Marco. The end of the world!”
They were at the northernmost tip of the island. The caldera of the old volcano rose like a jagged green wall, slightly terraced into narrow overlapping ledges that ran directly down into the crashing sea. The heights of the caldera were shrouded in gray rags of cloud and mist.
Standing in front of this looming wall were three black slabs of rock, each one lower than the first, their spires sharp and splintered like giant flakes of obsidian. The three formations each stood separate from the others, the caldera cliff rising like spidery stone fingers clawing up from the sea. The base of the spires was hidden in deep shadow and skirts of rising foam, but for a second Holliday thought he saw a darker patch that might have been the narrow entrance to a cavern.
“The statue stood at the top of the black pillar!” Tavares yelled, pointing upward. Holliday stared.
The foot of the three bony fingers was a froth of crashing surf that threw up enormous curtains of foaming spray, the sound like echoing thunderclaps. Tavares was right; it did look just like the end of the world. Beyond it there was nothing but empty sea. The captain threw the throttles into neutral.
The engines surged and whined and the San Pedro bobbed unhappily on the rolling chop racing under her hull to throw itself onto the great black rocks directly in front of them a few hundred yards away. Peggy was starting to look a little green.
“I thought I saw the mouth of a cave!” Holliday yelled, raising his voice over the booming surf.