A Signal Victory Read Online Free Page A

the stern, the other at the prow. The one at the stern was the Franciscan, Aguilar, white, scrawny, and sacred. He had dealt so long with death, which was all of the world he understood, that he recognized the symptoms. His face glistened with stale sweat. He had assumed that mummified look the Spaniards like to see on their saints. He was prepared.
    But Guerrero knew Aguilar was no saint. There were no saints. There were only brave men, the rest of us, and fools, and a brave man does not die that way, You may kill him, but he does not submit, to earth or heaven, in quite that self-deluded way.
    In his lap the Franciscan held his breviary. He had not read it for days, but he kept turning the pages, as though looking for something that wasn’t in this volume at all, but in some other one, the same size and shape, that he had left behind by mistake.
    Guerrero found it an interesting problem: how long could a Franciscan live without water? There was something in the man’s eyes Guerrero did not wish to see, something thirsty, greedy, and obscurely shy. The man hated everything, and yet he wanted to live. It seemed incredible.
    Between them the others lay piled over each other, faintly awash at the bottom of the boat.
    He knew he had to stay awake, but he couldn’t. He looked at the sun, all the spots before his eyes merged into each other, and he became unconscious.
    Aguilar pursed his lips. He wasn’t really staring. He wasn’t really thirsty. He could see things only as a blur, and he had forgotten the taste of water. But he saw Guerrero’s thick bronze neck twitch and topple, and that pleased him in an idle, drifting kind of way. If they all had to die, he at least wanted to be last, and now he was. Nor did he care for strong animal men, or anyone not like himself. He suspected sometimes that perhaps they were not devout.
    He went on staring, and seeing less and less.
    It must have been the fog that revived him.
    It was a thin, eddying, almost invisible fog, and condensed in long seminal streamers, here and there, clotting in the air, recruited with a sudden spurt into visibility, until the boat was drifting through a corridor of cobwebs. The air was suddenly cold.
    The sound of the surf was louder.
    According to Ptolemy, the world is surrounded by a river, which, since its symbol is a snake with its tail in its mouth, must always be cold. According to Strabo, there is nothing at the end of the world but England, and beyond England, ice, a solid wall of ice. Someone must have seen it once. It stretched from Norway to Greenland, and sometimes came as far south as Reykjavik.
    Is there really such a place as Reykjavik? Do the people there have one foot and one eye?
    According to Dante, the lowest circle of hell is merely ice, solid ice, and you sit there up to your neck, suffering for your sins.
    Aguilar stirred and opened his eyes. He was too weak to believe what he saw, but he felt much better. He was not damned. He had always thought it impossible that he could be. Only other people were damned, for he had been careful always to avoid sin, and since, like all fanatics, he thought in negatives, therefore he was one of the saved.
    For Bishop Brendon, that obscure Irish cleric, has his own vision of Ultima Thule. Sailing due west he beached on Hy Brasil. And Hy Brasil, as we know, was paradise, an island with steep cliffs, heavily forested, ecclesiastically scented, with great white cliffs, and nothing but innocence everywhere.
    The surf was now louder. It was a low surf, imminently booming. Aguilar stared with a certain horror. The fog had gone. It was evening, the soft, purple evening of the tropics. The cliff was shaggy, and abrupt. It was draped with foliage. And shimmering there, against a hovering sky, already faint with stars, were the towers and battlements of a white and quiet city.
    He heard drums. He heard wisps of chanting, lonely, empty, and far away. He heard the great entry of a conch, but he had never heard