The Mapmaker's Daughter by Laurel Corona

the routine of spending mornings with Papa before going off for long rides on Chuva.
    As the days grew shorter, the word reaching us from Tangiers worsened. The Portuguese troops were poorly supplied and too few for a successful assault, and in early October, Prince Henry was forced to sign terms of capitulation, cede the fortress at Ceuta he had won from the Moors in his youth, and send his army home. Nevertheless, when King Duarte died the next year, the blame for the debacle at Tangiers was shifted by Prince Henry’s minions onto the dead king’s shoulders, and the disgraced prince emerged again to wave the flag for Portugal’s rising greatness in the world.
    Henry the Navigator. How little I understood his secrets at the time!
    I go to the window and see no signs of life except a scrawny dog sniffing at garbage in an alley. Even looters of Jewish property need a break from the pounding sun. By increments too small to notice, the room has become suffocating, and I stay by the window hoping to catch even the smallest hint of a breeze. In the distance, I hear the slow roll of thunder, and the street darkens for a moment as a cloud passes across the sun.
    Perhaps this day will end in rain—welcome except for those like me, whose armful of remaining possessions will be soaked as we make our way out of Spain. May it ruin everything stolen from this house. May torrents sweep through Spain washing away everything, making us the Noahs and Torquemada and his army of benighted souls the victims of God’s wrath.
    Everything but the atlas. I cannot bear the thought. Sitting down, I pick it up before succumbing to a listlessness so great I can’t make the effort to open it. Instead, I gaze at the floor and listen for even the smallest sounds, relishing a silence as deep as I remember at Sagres during those rare times the wind died. I remember my last days there, the faint crack of surf against the cliffs, the nicker of horses in the corral. The muted sound of Martim and Tareyja’s voices drift through the air, blending with the soft scratches of father’s quills, and the clicks and taps of his brushes…
    SAGRES 1438
    Papa finishes wrapping his pens and sets them into a woven basket next to his inks and pigments. His maps and charts are safely rolled inside their stiff leather cases while his tiny pots and dishes dry after Tareyja’s washing.
    My belongings are packed and we are waiting now for the escort that will take us away from Sagres. It is August, shortly before my twelfth birthday, and Prince Henry has been back in Raposeira for a little over two months.
    “It’s different now,” Papa signed to me one night when I grew tearful, thinking his moodiness was caused by discontent with me. “He’s not the man he was before he went to Tangiers.”
    Defeat has made the corners of Henry’s mouth surly and drooped his eyebrows into a permanent scowl. There’s no mention of new military crusades against the Moors, though his hatred of the infidels makes spittle fly whenever he speaks of them. Now all the talk is of Guinea and the opportunities for profit wasted in the past by his strategy of going farther south rather than bringing back more from the areas already explored. He is determined not to allow Guinea’s wealth to fall into the hands of people despised by God. Every coin that Guinea can put in Portugal’s coffers will be his answer to the Moors and to his critics at Duarte’s court.
    As usual, I am too wrapped up in my own world to pay much notice of Papa’s growing unease at court. He does not inform me when he sends a letter to Prince Henry asking to be relieved of his role as mapmaker, but within a few days, he is summoned to discuss the request, and I go with him to interpret.
    Prince Henry does not press Papa to change his mind. It will be good, he says, to have a younger man who can go along on the voyages and create notebooks and sketches on the spot. We make a dejected journey back to Sagres, and only