The Moghul Part 32

Almost too easy.

Pox on it, believe in your luck for a change. The voyage will post a fortune in pepper. Lancaster was knighted for little more than bringing home his vessels. He reached Java, but he found no trade. He'd have sailed home a pauper if he hadn't ambushed a rich Portuguese galleon in the harbor at Sumatra.

How many weeks to a knighthood? Three? Four? No, we'll make it in less.

We'll man every watch. Woolens aland, cotton out. I'll have the frigates laded, stores on board--we can buy cattle and sheep from villages up the coast--and all repairs completed in two weeks. I'll have both frigates in open seas inside a fortnight, where not a Portugal bottom afloat can touch us.

And if permission for the trip to Agra comes, I'll be out of Surat too.

If I live that long.

He reached into his belt and drew out a long Portuguese stiletto. An elaborate cross was etched into the blade, and

the handle was silver, with a ram's head at the b.u.t.t. The ram's eyes were two small rubies. He had been carrying it for two days, and he reflected again on what had happened, still puzzling.

He had returned to the observatory the next morning after he had met Shirin, and this time he brought his lute. But she did not come. That morning, or the morning after, or the morning after. Finally he swallowed his disappointment and concluded he would not see her again.

Then it was he had gone to work cleaning away the moss and acc.u.mulated mud from the stone instruments. Parts of some seemed to be missing, and he had searched the hut for these without success. All he had found was a hand-held astrolabe, an instrument used to take the alt.i.tude of the sun. But he also found tables, piles of handwritten tables, that seemed to hold the key to the use of the instruments. His hopes had soared. It seemed possible, just possible, that buried somewhere in the hut was the key to the greatest mystery of all time--how to determine longitude at sea.

Hawksworth had often pondered the difficulties of navigation in the deep ocean, where only the sun and stars were guides. They were the primary determent to England's new ambition to explore the globe, for English navigators were still far less experienced than those of the Spanish and Portuguese.

The problem seemed overwhelming. Since the great earth was curved, no line on its surface was straight, and once at sea there was absolutely no way to determine exactly where you were, which way you were going, or how fast.

The least uncertain measurement was probably lat.i.tude, a ship's location north or south of the equator. In the northern hemisphere the height of the polestar was a reasonably accurate determinant of lat.i.tude, although it was a full three degrees distant from the northernmost point in the sky. Another measure of lat.i.tude was the height of the sun at midday, corrected for the specific day of the year. The problem lay in how to measure either of these elevations accurately.

A hundred years before, the Portuguese had come across an ingenious Arab device for telling the elevation of the sun. It consisted of a board with a knotted length of string run through the middle. If a mariner held the board vertically and sighted the horizon at one end and some object in the sky at the other, the length of the string between the board and his eye could be used to calculate the elevation of the object. In a short time a version appeared in Europe--with a second board replacing the string--called the cross-staff.

However, since locating both the horizon and a star was almost impossible at any time except dawn or dusk, this device worked best for sighting the sun--save that it required staring into the disc of the sun to find its exact center. Also, the cross-staff could not be used when the sun was high in the sky, which was the case in equatorial waters.

Another version of the cross-staff was the astrolabe, a round bra.s.s dial etched with degree markings and provided with a movable sight that permitted taking the elevation of the sun by its shadow. But even with the astrolabe there was the problem of catching the sun precisely at midday. And on a rolling ship the error in reading it could easily be four degrees.

For longitude, a ship's location east or west on the globe, there were no fixed references at all; but as a mariner traveled east or west, the sun would come up somewhat earlier or later each day, and precisely how much earlier or later could be used to compute how far he had gone.

Therefore, calculating longitude depended solely on keeping time extremely accurately--something completely impossible. The best timekeeping device available was the hourgla.s.s or "sandgla.s.s," invented somewhere in the western Mediterranean in the eleventh or twelfth century. Sandgla.s.s makers never achieved real accuracy or consistency, and careful mariners always used several at once, hoping to average out variations. But on a long voyage seamen soon totally lost track of absolute time.

Since they were unable to determine a ship's location from the skies, mariners also tried to compute it from a vessel's speed and direction.

Speed was estimated by throwing a log

with a knotted rope attached overboard and timing the rate at which the knots in the rope played out--using a sandgla.s.s. Margins of error in computing speed were usually substantial. Direction, too, was never known completely accurately. A compa.s.s pointed to magnetic north, not true north, and the difference between these seemed to vary unaccountably at different locations on the globe. Some thought it had to do with the lodestone used to magnetize the needle, and others, like the Grand Pilot of the king of Spain, maintained seamen were merely lying to cover their own errors.

For it all, however, longitude was the most vital unknown. Many attempts had been made to find a way to fix longitude, but nothing ever worked. Seamen found the only real solution to the problem was "lat.i.tude sailing," a time-consuming and expensive procedure whereby a captain would sail north or south to the approximate lat.i.tude of his destination and then sail due east or west, rather than trying to sail on the diagonal. King Philip III of Spain had offered a fortune to the first man who discovered how to tell longitude at sea.

Hawksworth spent days poring through the piles of tables, many of which were strewn about the floor of the room and damaged from mildew and rot. Next he carefully copied the symbols off the walls of the circular building and matched these with those on several of the charts. Were these the names of the major stars, or constellations of the zodiac, or . . . what? The number was twenty-eight.

And then it came to him: they were the daily stations of the moon.

As he continued to sift through the doc.u.ments, he realized that the scholar who wrote them had predicted eclipses of the moon for many years in advance. Then he found a book, obviously old, with charts that seemed to provide geometric corrections for the distortion caused by the atmosphere when sighting stars near the horizon, something that always had been troublesome for navigators.

He also found other writings. New. Some appeared to be verses, and others, tables of names and numbers. Sums of

money were written next to some of the names. But none of it meant anything without the Persian, which he could not read. And Shirin had never returned to the observatory, at least not when he was there.

Until two days ago.

At the observatory that morning the sky had been a perfect ice blue, the garden and orchard still, the air dry and exhilarating. No workmen were splashing in the moat beyond the wall that day. Only the buzz of gnats intruded on the silence. He had brought a bottle of dry Persian wine to make the work go faster, finding he was growing accustomed to its taste. And he had brought his lute, as always, in hope Shirin would come again.

He was in the stone hut, cleaning and sorting pages of ma.n.u.script, when she appeared silently in the doorway. He looked up and felt a sudden rush in his chest.

"Have you uncovered all of Jamshid Beg's secrets?" Her voice was lilting, but with a trace of unease. "I've found out that was our famous astronomer's name. He was originally from Samarkand."

"I think I'm beginning to understand some of the tables." Hawksworth kept his tone matter-of-fact. "He should have been a navigator. He could have been a fellow at Trinity House."

"What is that?"

"It's a guild in England. Where navigators are trained."

She laughed. "I think he preferred a world made only of numbers." Her laugh was gone as quickly as it had come, and she moved toward him with a vaguely troubled look. "What have you found?"

"A lot of things. Take a look at this drawing." Hawksworth tried to remain nonchalant as he moved the lamp back to the table from where he had placed it on the floor. "He identified what we call parallax, the slight circular motion of the moon throughout the day caused by the fact it's not sighted from the center of the earth, but from a spot on its surface that moves as the earth rotates. Now if he could measure that accurately enough with these instruments . . ."

Shirin waved her hand and laughed again. "If you

understand all this, why not just take the papers back to the palace and work with them there?" She was in the room now, her olive cheeks exquisitely shadowed by the partially open door, where flickering shadows played lightly through the brilliant sunshine. "Today I'd rather hear you play your English instrument."

"With pleasure. I've been trying to learn an Indian raga." He kept his voice even and moved himself deftly between Shirin and the doorway, blocking her exit. "But it sounds wrong on the lute. When I get to Agra I'm thinking I'll have a sitar made . . ."

He reached as though for the lute, then swung his hand upward and clapped it over Shirin's mouth. Before she could move he shoved her against the wall beside the door and stretched with his other hand to seize the heavy bra.s.s astrolabe that rested on a stand by the table. He caught a look of pure terror in her eyes, and for a moment he thought she might scream. He pressed her harder against the wall to seal her mouth, and as the shaft of light from the doorway dimmed momentarily he stepped forward and swung the bra.s.s astrolabe upward.

There was a soft sound of impact, followed by a choked groan and the clatter of metal against the wooden door. He drew back the astrolabe, now with a trace of blood along its sharp edge and the remains of a tooth wedged between its discs. Then he looked out to see a dark- skinned Indian man in a loincloth rolling himself across the top of the garden wall. A faint splash followed, as he dropped into the moat.

When Hawksworth released Shirin and placed the astrolabe back on its stand, he caught the glint of sunshine off a stiletto lying in the doorway. He bent down to retrieve it and suddenly she was next to him, holding his arm and staring at the place where the man had scaled the wall.

"He was a Sudra, a low caste." She looked at the stiletto in Hawksworth's hand, and her voice turned to scorn. "It's Portuguese.

Only the Portuguese would hire someone like that, instead of a Rajput."

Then she laughed nervously. "If they'd hired a Rajput, someone would be dead now. Hire a Sudra and you get a Sudra's work."

"Who was it?"

"Who knows? The horse bazaar is full of men who would kill for ten rupees." She pointed toward the wall. "Do you see that piece of cloth?

There on the old spike. I think it's a piece of his _dhoti_. Would you get it for me?"

After Hawksworth had retrieved the shred of cotton loincloth, brown from a hundred washings in the river, she had taken it from him without a word.

"What will you do with it?"

"Don't." She touched a finger to his lips. "These are things it's best not to ask." Then she tucked the brown sc.r.a.p into the silken sash at her waist and moved toward the door. "And it would be better if you forgot about today."

Hawksworth watched her for a second, then seized her arm and turned her facing him. "I may not know what's going on. But, by Jesus, I'll know before you leave. And you can start by telling me why you come here."

She stared back at him for a moment, meeting his eyes. There was something in them he had never seen before, almost admiration. Then she caught herself and drew back, dropping into a chair. "Very well.

Perhaps you do deserve to know." She slipped the translucent scarf from her hair and tossed it across the table. "Why don't you open the wine you brought? I'll not tell you everything, because you shouldn't want me to, but I'll tell you what's important for you."