“Careful,” said the queen. “You’re getting close to blasphemy.” Gerbaut smiled.
“It was the hand of God that pushed those waves,” said Godin without blinking. “I think He is free to kill as many of his own ministers as He wishes.”
Gerbaut felt the need to interject, “What were you doing in Lisbon in the first place?”
“Her Majesty ordered me to go there. I helped redesign and rebuild Lima when God punished it nine years ago.”
Gerbaut’s face turned red with shame. He silently vowed to not risk another embarrassment.
Godin went on, “After the tremor, many believed they would be safer if they ran to the shoreline, far from the buildings. There they noticed that the sea had retreated an impossible distance, and a mere hour later it returned with gigantic waves that forced them to run back toward the city, but the sea ran faster. Half the city was flattened by the water and the other half was burned because the earthquake toppled candles in all the churches. Those who managed to escape drowning choked in the smoke. Then came another wave, and another. There is no more Lisbon. Nothing remains there.”
“This is worse than Lima,” whispered the queen. “Viceroy Manso gave me an exceedingly high recommendation of your services. Do you think you’ll be able to do something for Lisbon?”
“The whole city will have to be rebuilt. Not that there will be many inhabitants left to make houses for.”
“How many died?” asked Doctor Mutis, hoping not to be too impudent.
“Twelve thousand,” said Godin calmly.
“Just in Lisbon?”
Godin nodded, and Mutis felt his head spinning. He tried to tell himself he shouldn’t be so shocked; he had seen plenty of cadavers at the faculty of medicine, and those in Lisbon were ones he wasn’t even seeing. But twelve thousand in a single city, and by divine decree, was almost too much for one man’s faith.
Mutis struggled to pay attention to the rest of the meeting. At one point it seemed that Gerbaut was arranging with Governor Azlor the repair works on the dock, which should be ready before the next merchant fleet was scheduled to depart for the Indies; but he didn’t hear when the topic of the conversation changed again, and now the queen was asking about the massive structure occupying almost the entire room, as if she had just noticed it.
“When the sea came over the city, it pushed this thing onto the shore,” Azlor was explaining. “Inside it we found several sailors from the north. We think they may be Dutch, but they haven’t spoken.”
“Why haven’t you tortured them?” asked the queen.
Governor Azlor pointed at Mutis. “Because they’re being treated at the Cádiz Hospital, which won’t let us do our job.”
Maria Theresa addressed the young doctor. “Have those men transferred into the Governor’s care. It’s unacceptable that we don’t even know which country they serve.”
Mutis made a show of writing down her order between submissive nods, but swore privately, with the naïve determination of the young, that he’d be tortured himself before yielding his patients.
Paying him no further attention, the queen pointed at the ship. “Can anyone explain what we have here?”
Gerbaut stepped forward. “It is clearly some sort of vessel, but for what purpose, we don’t know. It has one cannon on top, but the exterior of the weapon is disguised as a branchless tree. The rows on the sides of the vessel must be operated from within, but we’re not sure that we have the overall position right—”
The queen stood up. “You say this thing is Dutch?”
“Its crew appear of northern stock, so that’s what we’re assuming, Your Majesty.”
She ran her fingers over the bottom of the hull, shaking her head. “I know this wood. My father made me visit the provinces of our enemies. I’ve seen entire villages made of this.” She turned to the men and declared, “This is Norwegian spruce. You’re pointing your finger at the wrong country.”
Azlor’s mind drew the obvious conclusion. “If the ship is Norwegian…”
Gerbaut was thinking the same. “Then we’ve uncovered the reason for the success of the Canutic Empire.”
The queen turned to face Godin. “I remember your report about Lima.”
“Indeed,” said the Frenchman, “there was talk of strange-looking ships being seen at the coast, but at the time I dismissed them as the baseless rumors to be expected of terrified people.”
“We’ve been sent a message from Heaven,” said the queen, nodding several times as her thoughts ran. “The earthquake in Lima occurred on the feast of Saint Judas Thaddaeus. This one came on the Day of All Saints. We didn’t listen the first time, so God spoke again.”
Mutis wanted to point out that, as long as the Catholic Church insisted on filling the calendar with holy feasts, everything was bound to happen on some saint’s day, but he thought better of it.
Azlor’s voice shook as he asked, “For how long have they been hiding this machine?” He tried to retrace mentally the milestones in the ascent of the Canutic Empire, knowing that everyone in the room was doing the same exercise, afraid to venture a number of years, feeling the seed of anger sprout from fertile speculations.
“Are you suggesting,” asked Gerbaut, “that this is why our ships vanish?”
The young Mutis felt his back dampen with cold sweat. Occasional disappearances of ships had been treated as normal, either as random card shuffles that yielded winners and losers, or else as surprise demonstrations of God’s absolute will, for far longer than he’d lived. He looked around and realized that the same was true of everyone there.
Maria Theresa pressed her hand against the hull more forcefully, feeling frustrated that she couldn’t grasp it in its entirety. “A naval power armed with this kind of ship for at least the past century would have been able to manipulate history according to its pleasure.”
The governor started to pronounce a name he dared not finish. He saw the tremor in the queen’s eyes and knew she’d heard him.
The name was Philip.
At the start of the century, it had briefly been the case that Philip of the House of Bourbon, brother of the king of France, had been offered the Iberian throne, but the thought that France could gain control of the Iberian colonies in addition to its own had mobilized the Protestant nations to another war, this one over the question of the Iberian succession. While the French pretender was en route to Naples to pacify the Kingdom of the Two Sicilies, his ship sank, and the throne went to the other candidate, Charles of the House of Habsburg, Holy Roman Emperor and Maria Theresa’s father.
The implication was an offense of the highest magnitude. The independence of Nova Dania had weakened Denmark’s military influence, which was the reason why initial partition plans for the Iberian Empire during the succession crisis had failed, but the truth of her situation couldn’t be avoided. She only sat on the throne of the Iberian Union because the Canutic Empire had wanted her to, and not by divine decree.
“This is outrageous,” blurted out Gerbaut, regarding the vessel with contempt. “This means the wars of religion never ended. This means the Danish have committed entire generations’ worth of acts of war, one after another, with full impunity.”
“It’s worse,” said the queen. “This is a usurpation of God’s place as arbiter of history. I don’t care how many ships like this they may possess; I will make it the mission of the Iberian Union to destroy the Canutic Empire.”
No one wished to break the silence that followed. The four men knew the Iberian Union had nothing that could oppose this machine. They had no idea how it was made or how it worked, and the queen was still losing ships every month. She could barely hold the reins of her colonies anymore; New Granada and Santiago all but ruled themselves, and with Scotland still occupying Darién, the Peruvian silver supply could easily slip from her hands. Gerbaut felt it was his duty to warn, “To tell Your Majesty the truth, our bellic capabilities seem outmatched.”