The Vellum of Tides

The orchard went down in terraces to the edge of the abyss, sheltered from the north wind by a wall of Roman ashlar. Under the waning moon, the bare apple trees looked like skeletons stuck into the frost. Rodrigo waited in the shadow of the tool shed with a greased leather saddlebag: his brass compasses with steel points, two boxwood rulers, a bronze pen and a roll of blank parchment. Everything else he had ever owned had stayed behind in Burgos.

Leonor came without a sound on the gravel, wrapped in a brown cloak and shod in riding boots that had never come out of any novice's trousseau. Under her arm she carried a tin cylinder sealed with pitch.

"My uncle has let the mastiffs loose in the courtyard," she whispered. "The escort is sleeping in the guesthouse on the lower road, but their horses are saddled. They'll come for you at first light."

Rodrigo took out his slate and wrote a single word.

Why?

He wiped it and wrote beneath: How do you know who I was?

"My uncle keeps the letters from Burgos in the same chest as the queen's papers. The last one had your name in it and the word 'urgent' three times." Leonor almost smiled. "And in the margin of a psalter you copied in autumn there was a river. Nobody born to be a monk copies a psalter like that."

Rodrigo looked down at his hands. For two years no one had spoken to him as though he had ever been someone.

"Because this monastery doesn't keep the word of God. It keeps the papers the viceroyalty doesn't want anyone to read." Leonor opened the cylinder and drew out a second parchment, thick and yellow. "The boundary charters Queen Elenora signed with the first councils of the valley. My uncle is paid by the bankers of Flanders to keep them here under a flagstone. And in spring he's marrying me to the corregidor of Burgos, who is sixty and has buried three wives, to pay his gambling debts."

They spread the portolan on a stone bench and shielded the candle with their cloaks.

They smelled of wet wool and wax. From the courtyard came the growling of the mastiffs, sniffing the wind and not yet deciding what it was bringing them.

Rodrigo bent over the vellum. The contour lines showed a skill that made him swallow: whoever had drawn this knew how to measure. He followed with his finger the fine line of the pass over the glacier of the Three Sisters to the saddle and, from the saddle, the valley of Oakhaven. With that road open, the wheat of Valdelobos and the salt of the mountains could reach the north without paying a single maravedí in Burgos. That was why the court cartographers had struck it from every atlas.

Then he looked at the date in the corner. He wrote on the slate:

Three hundred years. Glaciers move. This line may lead us into a crevasse.

"That's why just anyone won't do." Leonor held his gaze. "I read the sky better than the pilots of the Indies fleet; my father taught me. You know how to measure what lies between a step and the abyss. Together we can correct the map as we go. If we stay, the garrote is waiting for you and the corregidor for me."

Rodrigo wiped the slate with his sleeve. He looked at Leonor's hands in the candlelight: slender, resolute, ink-stained like his own. He took them in his and squeezed. That needed no chalk.

She took a rusty key from her sleeve and opened the postern. The hinges, freshly greased, made no sound. Beyond, the goat path climbed in zigzags through the mist toward the silent peaks.

They had gone thirty paces when, behind the wall, a mastiff began to bark. Then another. Then all of them. In the abbey tower a window lit up, then another, and in the guesthouse on the lower road someone shouted an order in a barracks accent.

Leonor didn't turn around. She took his hand and began to climb.

When Rodrigo looked back from the first bend, a line of torches was already coming out of the monastery gate and taking the goat path.

They climbed all night. At dawn, from the first moraine, the monastery was a grey smudge hanging from the cliff and the torches had become a motionless thread of smoke: the escort had camped at the foot of the path, waiting for daylight to follow their tracks in the snow.

Leonor sat down on a rock, pulled off a boot and emptied the frost out of it.

"Three days to the saddle, if the map doesn't lie," she said. "If it does, you'll tell me."

Rodrigo took out his slate. He wrote: It lies. And beneath, smaller: But less than the court.