THREE

1588

She was the sun in his sky. That was how he thought about her, right from the start. After the cold chaos of the past months, the misery, the pain, sickness and despair, she seemed, however briefly glimpsed at first, as warm as the sun, or like the pale gold of the oranges that grew in the garden his mother had loved so much. It was home that Mateo was pining for, home that the girl brought to his mind: the light springtime days, the pink and white almond blossoms and blue skies of home. He had no notion of that season here, in the miserable North. For all he knew, it would be much like now: cold, wet and inhospitable. When he closed his eyes, he could still see her, could call to mind his first sight of her, as though, in that moment, something of her had been imprinted on whatever lay behind his eyes, the mysterious place where memories, dreams and hopes were stored.

Lilias. The name suited her: tall, pale and straight as a lily.

She was wrapped in a voluminous woollen outer garment – he couldn’t say whether it was a cloak or a blanket – that made her look monumental, like a painted statue, like an image of the blessed virgin or a young saint from one of the churches of his island. It was woven in some kind of fine wool, dyed yellow, and it billowed around her in the wind. She looked faintly unreal, as though if he rubbed his eyes, she might disappear. She was standing on a low promontory with the crumbling remains of a circular tower behind her. It was very like the round tower where he and Francisco had hidden for a while in Ireland. It amazed him later that he should have noticed her first, before everything else, noticed – how foolish – that her woollen cloak, if cloak it was, had something of the colour of the rocks in it. The grey rocks of this coast were made vivid with some yellow overlay that he had seen in Ireland too, albeit in different circumstances. There, the yellow had been stained red with the blood of his friends and colleagues, his shipmates, while here, the yellow was pure and unadulterated. As yet. He trusted to nothing. He carried a weapon, a small fighting dagger from Toledo, a gift from his uncle. There had been no gifts from his father. There had been a dagger for Francisco too, but the younger lad had lost his, letting it fall into the water in the midst of all the confusion. Mateo had his weapon carefully concealed about his body, beneath his clothing, but accessible enough if need be. He found its presence reassuring and, so far, he had managed to keep it with him, which was something of a miracle in itself.

He and Francisco staggered ashore on the island of Garbh from the vessel that had brought them this far, a single-masted birlinn that had taken them away from the horrors of Ireland, in search of a less ill-fated welcome in Scotland. Hope was a great thing. The voyage, short as it was, had cost them dear and there was almost nothing of value left should they need to bribe their way from here onwards, which was very likely. He was uncomfortably aware that Francisco was relying on him, believed that he had a plan. He had no plan, other than to resolve their immediate need for food and shelter, and find some kind of assurance that they would not be killed on sight. They would just have to trust to luck, which had served them well enough so far. The captain, a cheerful islandman with an abiding dislike of the English, knew these waters well, but he would bring them only so far in these heaving seas, anchoring offshore and sending them ashore in a tiny skin-covered tender that rode the waves efficiently enough. Even so, Mateo had noticed how the two men rowing them had zig-zagged, presumably to avoid a succession of perilous rocks just below the surface.

Even back in Ireland, they had been a scant handful of men, those survivors of the Santa Maria de la Candelaria, his ship, or rather his captain’s ship. He had been the navigator. Had there not been so much else to appal and terrify him, that alone might have kept him from sleep: wondering how much of the disaster had been his fault. In his calmer moments, of which there were very few, he realised that he could not have foreseen these devastating events. Who could? Well, perhaps Medina Sidonia, their leader, had known. Had foreseen. Had embarked upon the venture with great foreboding, knowing the whole enterprise to be doomed, but in the way of powerful men everywhere, had proceeded with it anyway, for a host of reasons that had little to do with those who would suffer most.

So many young men were dead.

He, Mateo, had done his best with astrolabe and charts, but the Maria had broken her back somewhere off the rocky Irish coast, in spite of all they could do to invoke the protection of the Blessed Virgin after whom she was named. His captain, Alejandro, had gone down with the ship, as had so many. It was something of a miracle that he and Francisco had the skill of swimming. Few in La Laguna could swim, but he, Mateo, had spent weeks at his uncle’s house beside the sea and from splashing about in the water, he had learned and had taught Francisco, always the lesser of the two lads in terms of daring as well as in years.

The ship had run ashore on the north-west coast of Ireland. By then, many of the surviving sailors and soldiers had been beyond help anyway: lice-, bug- and flea-ridden, sick to death, starving but unable to eat what little food there was, because of the sickness. And terrified. Above all terrified. This was not what they had expected. Not what they had been promised. They had been promised victory and glory and golden spoils. It had struck him even then that there were, in all likelihood, no golden spoils to be had. And certainly not here. Aboard the ship, the rats had been healthier than the men, but ultimately their fates had been similar. A few of the men, Mateo and Francisco included, had stayed with the broken vessel as long as they could and the tide had washed them ashore along with the ship. Many had perished by jumping overboard too soon, but some would perish by waiting too long. There was no right decision. It was all luck, even though he had remembered his uncle’s advice. Francisco’s father, Santiago, had been a fine seaman in his day.

‘Stay with the ship as long as possible,’ he had said. ‘Leave only when it seems most prudent. When staying would be fatal.’

A big baulk of timber had come to their aid, allowing them to float and paddle. As he and Francisco struggled ashore, and even as he hauled the younger man out of the water by the scruff of his neck, like a drowning dog, he had seen rodents out of the corner of his eye, sure that some of them had swum to shore like themselves and were swarming up and over the rocks.

The men waiting for them on the shore had not concerned themselves with rats. Their prey was different. Who cared about mere rats when the enemy was within their grasp? Even those sailors and soldiers who had managed to swim and crawl ashore had not survived long. There had been such savagery that Mateo could not now bear to think of it. The images would rise unbidden to his mind and he would find himself wringing his hands or digging his nails into his palms until it hurt, in an effort to banish them. They haunted his dreams and he knew that Francisco was similarly afflicted, since he had heard him calling out in his sleep, had reached out more than once to shake him awake. On one occasion, hearing hoofbeats in the distance and fearing lest Francisco’s nightmares would give them away, he had put a hand over his cousin’s mouth to stifle the screams. The lad had lain so still afterwards that he had a sudden fear that he had smothered his cousin in his panic, but the boy had only fainted and came round a few minutes later in sickness and confusion. Mateo had an inkling that some of the people of Ireland, the ordinary people, leading lives of manifest poverty, would not have been so savage when confronted with needy young men who seemed less monstrous than the tales told of them, but it was clear that mercy was not in their gift, even had they wished to dispense it to the shipwrecked Spaniards.

Instead, those in power had methodically and brutally cleared the country of the enemy, much as a farmer and his men will kill vermin as they flee a barn, running from the dogs sent to roust them out. Those whom the sea had not seen fit to take had been slaughtered on land instead, terrified and pleading for their lives, their pleas ignored or mocked. He had seen a dozen of his companions summarily executed, even as they surrendered, begging for mercy, and only afterwards had the local women emerged to give the bloodied bodies a scarcely decent burial, wrapping them in coarse linen and sliding them into the pits their menfolk had dug for the purpose, intoning prayer the while. He and Francisco would surely have met the same fate if they had been discovered. The widow who had given a handful of survivors shelter in her small byre alongside her single cow was clearly terrified of the consequences for herself, pitying them but almost beside herself with fear. Well, they had left her in peace as soon as possible, leaving her besides a few of the coins they had been able to secrete about their persons, taking only some bread and cheese, walking by night as much as they could, and hiding by day, wherever they could find some shelter from the autumn downpours: ruined stables, ditches behind drystone walls, unguarded haylofts, the remains of a round tower that Francisco said he hated, without knowing why. Mateo scoffed at him, but felt exactly the same unreasonable fear. Mateo thought he knew where they were, at least, on the far north-west coast of this country, and knew that their best hope, nay, their only hope, lay in finding a vessel willing to take them to Scotland, where they might meet with a less ferocious welcome.

There were only five of them by this time, and they looked to Mateo for leadership, as the most senior of the party in authority, if not in years. They had looked to him for direction on board the Maria in the same way. He did as much as he could, but the reality was that there was no achievable plan, no respite, no succour. Close to starvation, they had been drinking from brackish pools when they couldn’t find springs, eating the nuts and berries of autumn and, when hunger overcame them, the raw shellfish by the seashore that sometimes made them as sick as the sea from which the creatures came. One night, three of their party, sailors from Santa Cruz, simply disappeared. As the light drained out of the sky, they had begun to make their way through a small patch of woodland with stunted, wind-blown trees and an undergrowth of some fiercely spiny shrub that tripped them and tore at them as they passed by. A few glossy but maggoty berries remained on the shoots, and they ate them eagerly, hoping that their sweetness meant that they were edible. To tell the truth, they were so weak with hunger that they hardly cared if the fruits were poison or not, as long as death came quickly.

Somehow, stumbling on through the trees, they had become separated into two groups. When grey daylight came, the other three men were nowhere to be seen. Had they been captured, or simply lost their way? Mateo and Francisco dared not shout. They took shelter amid a tangle of ivy and half-dead honeysuckle, with the stink of some strange fungus in the air, and waited, but there was neither sight nor sound of their companions. Mateo never discovered their fate, but suspected that they too had been caught and summarily killed. It sometimes struck him that the fate of those poor lads had been to his and Francisco’s benefit, since it was easier to travel as a twosome, and it was – at last – easier to persuade the Scottish captain of the little merchantman to give passage to two Spaniards rather than five, who might become troublesome, however much the man might believe that his enemy’s enemy was his friend. That was an uncomfortable thought, to be sure.

On the voyage to Eilean Garbh, his skin itching unbearably, running wick with bugs and lice, and exhausted to the point where even sleep would not come, he thought that, had the Santa Maria de la Candelaria survived the journey, they might have been on their way home by now. But the weather had defeated them first and last. He of all people should have known, with his skills at navigation, his seamanship, his learning, that the whole expedition was unwise. Well, reading is one thing and experiencing quite another. It is all very well to consider yourself an islandman born and bred. The seas around his home could be perilous and he had thought himself to be a reasonably experienced sailor, but he had never known anything quite like this: the cold, the ceaseless winds, the endless heaving seas and – let’s face it – the inadequacy of the Santa Maria when faced with the conditions they had encountered.

The men had been frightened, demoralised, homesick as well as seasick. The weather and the rocks of this inhospitable country had dealt them blow after blow, driving them straight into the arms of the waiting enemy. He had never been seasick before. Had considered himself impervious to the sickness that had afflicted so many of the soldiers in particular, early in their voyage. The sailors had laughed at them just at first, confident in their own abilities. And yet most of them had succumbed eventually. He too had been sick, over and over again. He had even been sick aboard the relative safety of the birlinn that brought them from Ireland to Eilean Garbh, retching constantly, with nothing but a little blood and spit, his stomach heaving.

With the autumn day already darkening, they were decanted from the tender, with no great gentleness, pushed onto the white sand, and left alone there. The boat immediately pulled away again, the oarsmen fighting with wind and waves, back to the single-masted oak vessel that had brought them here. The captain and his crew were obviously relieved to be rid of their human cargo. As though to welcome them with a volley of shot, a heavy shower of rain drove into their faces from the west. At that moment, walking unsteadily on the pale sand, glad to be on land if nothing else, Mateo looked up, shivering, his teeth chattering, and saw the young woman standing some distance away, watching the incomers. She was tall, swathed in golden wool, and although she had pulled the garment over her head against the driving rain, her hair had escaped from it and was blowing around her shoulders. Red hair. He saw that she had red hair against the yellow wool, the whole unfurling like a strange flag in the wind. It might have reminded him yet again of the blood on the rocks of Ireland, but instead it made him think of sunshine and the golden orange groves of home.

Even as he gazed up at her, he saw that she was no phantom. She had been joined by a small figure, similarly swathed in wool, brown wool this time: a child perhaps, who tugged at her to attract her attention. She glanced down, pulled the garment more closely around herself, took the child’s hand and began to walk away, quite briskly, as though alarmed but not panicked, disappearing over a little ridge of land. His gaze swivelled round and he saw that there was a house above them: a low, grey stone building with a dark thatched roof and chimneys, and a large stone and slate tower at one end. The Captain, McAllister, had promised to set them ashore close to a McNeill stronghold: ‘a friend to the Catholic cause and no friend to the English,’ was what he had said. Mateo did not entirely trust this judgement. He trusted nobody these days. But when he looked at Francisco’s poor, pale face in the failing light, he didn’t know what else to do. They must just climb up to the house, if they were able, and throw themselves on the uncertain mercy of McNeill of Garbh.