Magalhaes turned to Herrero, a Spaniard who could understand any tongue, no matter how uncivilised. Rumours, given strength by his dusky skin and quick temper, told that the interpreter’s affinity for the tongues of the savages was due to him being half-savage himself. Others said it was a gift from the devil. However he’d come about it, though, the ability had proven both useful and profitable on the journey so far. “Stay ashore and learn their tongue. I will have the ship send you a boatload of supplies. De Menes and Carrizo will stay with you.” Herrero nodded.
De Menes said nothing. He should have felt fury at the captain for belittling his beliefs once again, but there was no anger within his soul. He’d known what was coming, felt as though he was walking a predetermined path with an already decided ending, albeit one he could not see. All he saw when he thought about it was the greyness of impenetrable fog, an indeterminate future.
He simply walked behind Herrero as the linguist selected a campsite. This was not hard to do: the whole hillside was dotted with pits, each of which held the remains of a discarded campfire.
The rest of the morning passed peacefully. Herrero had wandered off and was seated in the centre of a group of natives, gesturing, laughing, offering gifts of beads and other trinkets which seemed to go down very well with the natives. Soon, they were gesturing for Carrizo and De Menes to join them.
The two sailors did as they were told. De Menes sat down gingerly between a greying old man and a woman who could not have been more than twenty, with jet-black hair. He tried to keep his eyes away from the exposed anatomy of the locals, but the circular seating arrangement made that difficult. Carrizo stared openly, but none of the women seemed to mind.
Herrero was already making progress with the language. Interspersed with the gesturing, there was now a word here, another word there, which seemed to please their hosts, who tried to correct his pronunciation and laughed at his efforts.
One woman, however, was paying no attention to Herrero. The girl De Menes had sat beside seemed to have eyes only for him and stared the entire time. At first, he thought it must simply have been the close-up view of his light skin and strange clothes, but he soon realised that the girl had not even glanced at the equally exotic figures of Carrizo and Herrero.
He smiled at her and placed one hand on his chest. “Joao,” he whispered. Her dark eyes invited him to speculate about the rest of her, and he tried desperately to keep his own gaze locked on them while she spoke.
“Teuhuech,” she replied, placing his hand on her own chest. He pulled it back quickly as she said something else, a rapid-fire string of words in her own language, delivered in a husky monotone. The man on De Menes’ opposite side chuckled.
At that moment, a couple of men from the Trinidad arrived, carrying sacks of provisions. “Your tent is down in the boat. If you want to sleep under cover, I’d suggest you get it. We aren’t coming back up here.”
Grumbling, but relieved to be able to escape from the strange natives for a few moments, Carrizo and De Menes walked down the hill. Herrero, of course, was much too important to be bothered with menial tasks. They joked with the oarsmen as they pulled the poles from the boat. “Magalhaes says we’ll be back tomorrow or the next day. He wants to sail beyond that outcropping—” the man pointed to a peninsula some leagues away “—to see whether we can replenish our water.”
De Menes’ heart sank. They would be alone, without even the comforting sight of the flotilla to keep him sane, on a small spit of land at the edge of the world. But he would not give the tyrant the satisfaction of begging to be allowed back on board. He gestured Carrizo to pick up his half of the burden and set off towards the campsite.
The wind, already a desolate howl, had picked up even more as they began to pitch the tent. By De Menes’ reckoning, it was about three in the afternoon, and there were still hours and hours of late spring sunlight remaining. And yet the sunlight seemed weak, thin, as if its force was being drained by invisible fog. De Menes shivered.
The girl, Teuhuech, realised he was back almost immediately, and joined them just as Joao attempted to position the final tent pole. He watched her walk in their direction, unable to ignore the fact that there was a young and supple body beneath the red paint.
She playfully took hold of the tent pole, her surprisingly strong grip resisting his efforts to tear it from her grasp, and his attempts to twist the pole without making contact with her skin only made the native girl laugh.
Finally, she relented, allowing De Menes and Carrizo to finish erecting their tent, a medium-sized piece of canvas suitable for three men. When it was done, she smiled and crawled inside. De Menes tried to look away, but Carrizo had no such qualms. He stared at the indecently exposed flesh and then turned to his companion and winked lewdly. “I would go in after her, my friend, but I don’t think that would make her happy. You, on the other hand, should hurry before she changes her mind.”
De Menes gave him a dark look. While he wasn’t a saint, by any means, and certainly wasn’t averse to the occasional dalliance with a native girl, this one’s single-minded determination made him nervous. It was impossible to shake the feeling that there was something deep and disturbing lurking just behind those smiles. Maybe it was just his dread at having been abandoned by his ship at the edge of the world with nightfall approaching fast. But he felt his soul and his immortal existence were at the mercy of forces no mortal could ever hope to control.
He shook his head and returned to the circle where Herrero was still holding court. The Spaniard complemented his limited—yet still impressive, considering how little time he’d taken to create it—vocabulary with wild gestures and vocal sound effects. His audience sat in rapt attention.
“I’m telling them the story of our Atlantic crossing,” he explained. “Although they seem to believe that we’re sorcerers from the sky, because they saw the sails of our ship, and think it looks like a bird.”
De Menes nodded and sat on the cool ground, squeezing between two of the local men who’d arrived in their absence. The red paint did little to cover them, either, but it was still less distracting than having Tehuech beside him. As the story went on, more men arrived, none aggressive, all painted red. The girl, disappointment evident on her face as she saw his new seating arrangements, sat straight ahead of him.
The long afternoon’s anaemic light soon gave way to an eternal twilight, and the men began to drift to the nearby fire pits. Soon, the demonic eyes once more lit the hills, but this time De Menes sat amongst them. He wondered what else walked the night, connecting the dots between the warmth and light.
The sailors were left to their own devices as night came down and the last vestiges of the day’s warmth and cheer were swept away before the howling wind. De Menes had difficulty believing that the savages could bear the chill without clothes, and found himself wondering whether they insisted in that same lunacy during the winters, which he imagined must be merciless in those latitudes.
Their own fire was an unimpressive affair, built close to the tent and casting a small ring of light from which De Menes refused to venture even to relieve himself. He could feel the demon lords watching them from the darkness, present in every shadow and trying to find the doorway that led from their own grey and boundless kingdom into the world of the living.
Knowing sleep would be beyond him, he’d offered to stand guard. So he sat with his eyes open long after Carrizo and Herrero had drifted into snoring slumber. He cringed at each sound, ready to defend himself but, when the demon crawled into his tent and took his hand, he could do nothing but follow it out.