Pastwatch- The Redemption Of Christopher Columbus - By Orson Scott Card Page 0,58

and yet hurting her all the same, because he had to find a way to accomplish what God had given him to do.

During the voyage back to Portugal, Felipa was not so terribly seasick, but she nevertheless stayed in her bed, bleakly staring at the walls of her tiny cabin. And from this sickness of heart she would never recover. Even in Lisbon, where Dona Moniz hoped that her old friends would cheer her up, Felipa only rarely consented to go out. Instead she devoted herself to little Diego and spent the rest of her time haunting her own house. When Columbus was away on a voyage or on business in the city, she wandered about as if searching for him; when he was there, she would spend days working up the courage to try to engage him in conversation. Whether he politely listened or curtly asked her to let him alone so he could concentrate on his work, the end was the same. She went to her bed and wept, for she was not part of his life at all, and she knew no way to enter it, and so she loved him all the more desperately, and knew all the more surely that it was some failing in her that made her unlovable to her husband.

The worst agony was when he brought her along to some musical performance or to mass or to dine at court, for she knew that the only reason he was accepted among the aristocrats of Lisbon was because he was married to her, and so he needed her on these occasions and they both had to act as though they were husband and wife, and all the while she could barely keep herself from bursting into tears and screaming to everyone that her husband did not love her, that he slept with her perhaps once in a week, twice in a month, and that even that was without genuine affection. If she had ever allowed herself such an outburst, she might have been surprised at how surprised the other women would have been -- not that she had such a relationship with her husband, but that she found anything wrong with it. It was very nearly the relationship that most of them had with their husbands. Women and men lived in separate worlds; they met only on the bed to produce heirs and on public occasions to enhance each other's status in the world. Why was she so upset about this? Why didn't she simply live as they did, a pleasant life of ease among other women, occasionally indulging their children and always relying upon servants to make things go easily?

The answer was, of course, that none of their husbands was Cristovao. None of them burned with his inner fire. None of them had such a deep gravity of passion in his heart, drawing a woman ever closer, even though that deep well in him would drown her and never yield anything, never give off anything that might nourish her or slake her thirst for his love.

And Columbus, for his part, looked at Felipa as the years of marriage aged her, as her lips turned downward into a permanent frown, as she spent more and more of her time in bed with nameless illnesses, and he knew that he was somehow causing this, that he was harming her, and that there was nothing he could do about it, not if he was going to fulfil his mission in life.

Almost as soon as Columbus returned to Lisbon, he found the book that he was looking for. The geographic work of an Arab named Alfragano had been translated into Latin, and Columbus found in it the perfect tool to shrink those last 60 degrees to a reasonable voyaging distance. If Alfragano's calculations were assumed to be in Roman miles, then the 60 degrees of distance between the Canaries and Cipangu would amount to as little as 2,000 nautical miles at the latitudes he would be sailing. With reasonably favorable winds, which God would surely provide for him, the voyage could be made in as few as eight days; two weeks at the most.

He had his proofs now in terms the scholars would understand. He wouldn't come before them with nothing but his own faith in a vision he couldn't tell them about. Now he had the ancients on his side, and never mind that one of them was a Muslim, he could still build a