The title comes from a log entry made by Christopher Columbus during his first famous transatlantic voyage in 1492. In an Author's Note at the end, Friesner explains this and comments that what he probably saw were manatees.
However, for her purposes she assumes that right up until Columbus made landfall, there really were mermaids and other supernatural critters in the unknown reaches of the mysterious landmass on the west side of the Atlantic. And another ship from Spain beat him by a nose, although he never knew it. This book contains several of the diary entries of Sister Ana of the order of Las Descalzas de la Sangre Santa, which I believe would translate as "the barefoot women of the holy blood." An order of nuns, clearly. Whether or not they ever really existed in 15th Century Spain I don't know.
In the first few pages we realize that there is an odd assortment of passengers on this ship: several nuns, one priest, a Jewess (to quote Sister Ana), a Gypsy woman called La Zagala, and the master of the brass ship in which they are sailing, the Moorish sorceress called the lady Rasha of the Thousand Doors. The nuns and priest are extremely unwilling guests on this voyage, but Rasha has managed to keep them in line by summoning up the occasional demon to get their attention.
In the next day's entry, we have a flashback which explains how this peculiar situation came about - or as much of it as Sister Ana understands at the moment. In the convent where Ana resided, it was decided to use a large open courtyard for the sacred purpose of permitting the Inquisition to burn a few heretics at the stake. (Ana, incidentally, is the acknowledged but illegitimate daughter of a powerful Spanish lord who offered the convent a large sum for accepting his by-blow as a new recruit. Some of the other nuns have never ceased to make snide comments about the sinful circumstances of her birth. Friesner's opinion of the quality of the milk of human kindness in the blood of most 15th Century Spanish priests, monks, and nuns seems to be that it had long since curdled.
To give a sample of the writing style, let's see Sister Ana's recap of an inspiring sermon given by Brother Garcilaso, the Franciscan who later ended up on the ship with the others.
He had taken as his text Our Lord's bidding that if a man strike you on one cheek, you should turn him the other also. Though such vast libraries as the Franciscans ward are not the province of women, I have always been bold to interpret the Lord's words for myself. After fifteen minutes of Brother Garcilaso's exegesis, I discovered I had it all quite wrong. It seems that if a man strike you on one cheek, you turn him the other and while he has his hand drawn back for the second blow, you bare a dagger in God's name and stab him through the ribs.
Hallelujah.
That gives you the general idea of the narrator's personality. Just a wee bit disrespectful of authority in the privacy of her own mind. She was less than horrified when the longwinded preliminaries (and scheduled executions) were derailed by the magical intervention of La Zagala and Rasha, who had come to liberate a particular prisoner (the Jewess who was to be killed that day).
I've already given you a lot more plot summary than you probably think I have, because the opening scenes as the ship is encountering mermaids, followed by flashbacks to how these characters all ended up on this brass ship headed westward, takes up about one third of the novel (which is 155 pages in length). Just now a sudden suspicion came over me as I wrote that, and I counted the lines of text on a randomly selected page of my paperback edition of this book.
Thirty-one. 291 words on the page. Those of you who hang breathless upon my every word (there must be someone who meets that description, right?) will instantly recall that a couple of months ago I reviewed a "book" by Diane Duane which allegedly contained about 220 pages of text, but only had 31 lines to the page, giving it about 2/3 the number of words per page that it "should" have contained based on an average I calculated by examining random pages in six other paperback novels from six publishers. The "book" was actually the first five chapters of what might prove to be a decent novel, and a few days ago I reviewed another so-called "book" that was the next four chapters of the same narrative. I gave each item a single star for the simple reason that Epinions doesn't allow us to give anything lower than that. My basic point was that these fractions of a novel weren't worth the seven dollars apiece that each "book" had as its cover price, as if it were a complete story for my enjoyment. So you may be wondering why I gave this even shorter piece of literature four stars out of five.
By my estimate, this book (if printed in the normal paperback format) would only run about 121 pages instead of having the final page of the final chapter have "155" printed at the bottom. On the other hand, this story has a beginning (buried in flashbacks), a middle, and an end. The writing is lively and the plot manages to surprise me (even after I've read the first one-third of the material), which is more than many longer novels can say. And according to a sticker on the cover it only cost me $1.99 at a used book store, which certainly softens the blow of realizing how short it is :)
Given that the book is so short, however, I don't want to spoil it by telling you just what happens after the ship arrives at its destination. The whole thing will have more impact if you devour it at a single sitting, although I recommend you do as I did and find a way to get your hands on a cheap copy instead of paying through the nose for a brand new one (if it's even still in print). Suffice it to say that the central theme, not surprisingly, deals with matters of tolerance and independent thinking while showing some respect for the original Christian ideals, as opposed to the "burn burn burn burn burn!" attitude the Spanish Inquisition displayed in what it alleged to be the spirited defence of those sacred ideals.
P.S. Upon reflection, I decided to feed you one more little morsel. They end up visiting the court of the legendary Prester John, who was (in Medieval times) alleged to be an incredibly wise powerful resourceful pious etc. Christian monarch in some very distant country whose wealth could dwarf that any of any European monarch. The only problem was that he didn't exist - but Friesner has decided to assume that he did, and his court was just as fabulous as described, or even more so, despite his sharp divergence from "orthodox" Christian doctrine in various ways. (Some of the things he claims to know as fact on certain theological issues could shock even a modern Christian but I managed to endure it without losing any sleep over the issue. After all, it says "Fantasy" right there on the spine of the book. What exactly he wants to achieve, however, is something I'm going to leave mysterious, because I really meant it when I said that I could easily ruin the plot for you if I don't watch my words.)
Note: This book refers to Columbus as "the Genoese." Genoa is a city in Italy. It happens that I recently read a nonfiction book that included some discussion of Columbus, and it claimed that there is no solid evidence that he had a native fluency in Italian (such of his personal letters as we still have were normally written in Castillian Spanish, for instance). There were apparently enough contradictions in statements he made about himself and his origins over the years (after he became famous) to strongly suggest that he was intentionally concealing the truth, whatever it may have been. (The author favored the idea that he was born to a Jewish family on the northwest coast of Spain, but in Catholic-dominated Western Europe chose as a young man to claim Italian heritage instead to avoid being on the receiving end of racism.)
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