Read Online The Mapmaker's Daughter by Laurel Corona - Free Book Online Page B

be rather pleasant to see women at court though. If he had a wife and daughters, someone might notice that I have outgrown all my dresses and need new shoes. As it is, I am invisible at my father’s side.
    The squire ushers us out of the antechamber into the bedroom, the largest room in the palace, where the prince holds his audiences. Around a large table are a half-dozen men, most of them middle-aged like the prince, except one, Diogo Marques, who looks to be eighteen or twenty.
    Prince Henry is standing in the middle of the group, poring over a roughly drawn navigator’s chart. I recognize three of his sea captains as frequent visitors to Raposeira.
    “Senhor Riba,” the prince says. “Show us what you have, even if it isn’t finished.” I point to Prince Henry, then to my eyes, then to the leather case where my father stores his work. He pulls out his new chart and lays it on the table.
    “Our latest ships went a hundred leagues beyond Cape Bojador and still haven’t found the mouth of the Gold River,” Prince Henry says, smoothing down the curling edges of the vellum. “It must be there. We have it on good authority in our sourcebooks.” My father has drawn the north and west coasts of Africa, including a river known as the Gold, which extends deep into the continent below Cape Bojador. Near the middle, it parts around a huge island Papa has labeled Insula Palola, a place some travelers’ accounts say is rich with gold.
    Prince Henry’s face is long and square. Green eyes look out from under a broad-brimmed, velvet hat from which a few curls, gray at the temples, have escaped. His most notable feature is his hands. His fingers are thin and fragile for a man, and his nails are always well trimmed. He tents his fingers when he is lost in thought and touches his palms together in a single light clap when he has thought of something that excites him.
    He is looking at the blank bottom of my father’s new map, devoid of anything but a rough outline to the south, representing the unknown reaches of the coast of Guinea, as the area below Cape Bojador is called. After running his finger off the lower edge of my father’s chart, the prince traces a straight line to the east. As he turns north and comes back onto the chart, he stops and taps his finger. “We should try to round Guinea—it cannot be much farther south than we have already gone.”
    He makes a semicircle inland to indicate a large bay whose top is just below where my father has painted Egypt. “The Sinus Ethiopicus,” Prince Henry says. “I don’t understand why none of the Saharan traders has heard of a bay that is supposed to be as big as a sea.”
    He looks at the group as if someone might have an explanation. “Perhaps there is no such place,” one of the men replies. “The traveler who described it has been wrong before. Some people doubt he visited many of the places he wrote about.”
    “Perhaps,” Henry says. “But the Saharan traders’ camels are laden with gold, and they get it from somewhere.”
    “Not from the sand,” another says, “unless they have greater alchemists than all of Christendom.”
    Everyone laughs, but Henry is too intent on my father’s chart to hear the joke. “If the Gold River is here,” he says, “we could sail almost all the way across Africa. We could set up outposts here”—he taps the farthest reach of the Gold River—“and here.” His finger marks the shore of the Sinus Ethiopicus. “Connect those two by a road over land, and we will unite the coasts of Africa. With that, we will control all trade with Europe from Africa and the Indies. More than that, we will have reached the kingdom of Prester John, and together we can drive the Moors out of Africa.”
    Prester John, the only Christian ruler in Africa, is said to have a standing army of ten thousand men and so much wealth in his empire that his foot soldiers go into battle with swords of gold. Prince Henry wants to join forces with him