"So much blood…” he had said.
And there was. It had splattered my shirt, drenched my hose, and was caking on my hands. Not knowing where to start, he mopped my lips and cheek with his cloth, leaving smears of olive green paint instead.
“It’s not mine.” I replied.
“It’s always yours.” he had said.

We both know the Bible includes many passages justifying mass murder, your Grace – the dashing out of infants brains on rocks, the tearing out of unborn children from their mothers’ bellies, and we have seen how wicked men still use these passages for evil – I saw it for myself in Hispaniola. The Bible, like those who wrote it, is both good and bad, and it needs to repent of the malice that rises like smoke from its pages, instead of idly preaching that repentance is ours alone to do. And since it will not do so by itself, we need to help, by removing the corrupt, evil texts added by wicked men. Jesus did not tolerate such cruelty, nor should we – and having removed the evil, we should add the valuable texts that these same men in their wickedness excluded. Do this most dramatic, most courageous of actions, blow through the Bible’s pages like a cleansing hurricane, and we will see the most wonderful opportunities emerge for a better world.

"We are doing things the Christian way. Count them and you will see. We hung one of them there for each of the twelve disciples, twelve candles as it were, and a thirteenth for our good Lord Jesus. We are teaching them respect for the Gospels. What better way? Do you think instead we should shoot them? Bishop Fonseca says that gunpowder against Indians is incense to the Lord, so perhaps that would be more to your taste?"

There are no heroes in this world, except in the imaginations of the young, the inexperienced, and the naive. God save my soul for being thus, and for daring to say so, but we are all, every one of us, both angel and demon. So much so that there never was a true angel or demon who walked upon the surface of this Earth, nor looked down upon it from on high, not even God Himself. All of them, every single one, including you and me, were and are both.

The first night of our becalming we had a brief tempest with lightning and thunder, but the second was flat calm, and we amused ourselves taking the advice of one who had crossed this mirror surface before. We allowed a row-boat to drift at the end of a long rope from our ship, partly filled with seawater. We erected above it a lantern to glow in the dark, and attracted by the promise of the light, these flying fish would glide into the boat, only to find they had no space now in this corral to rebuild their speed and launch themselves anew. They were trapped, and as the boat filled, they were sullied by their contact with the others, and then in the morning slain and eaten by those who had laid the trap. I suggested to Philip we name the row-boat ‘Chimera’, but he suggested the better name: ‘Truth’. It was, he said, the most monstrous of all those that fish.

I was in despair, and gazed from my window in Hatfield at the virginal willow outside, graceful in the early autumn’s afternoon light. Beneath, though, slithering shadows from its fronds stained the grass, undulating in the breeze like serpents. It was as if this Medusa were now hoping to colonise the palace grounds, and then the world.

Raphael’s Trojan Horse shows but one instant of touching despair and emotive self-pity, and it masquerades this alone is the eternal reality of the man… This new style is said to be more ‘true to what we see’, and more ‘natural’ since it ‘portrays the world by observation’ rather than by memory. It is said to be more ‘real’ than the Gothic and Medieval art that it follows, and if life were nothing more than a glimpse, that would be true. But it is not. How could anything that treats time as if it had stared Medusa in the face be ‘natural’? Raphael portrayed ‘the magnificence and tragedy of Pope Julius II’, and did it with mercantile skill, by selecting the most seductive glimpse, and portraying it as the whole, timeless ‘Truth’ - and by ignoring all the other features no one would want to buy. Thus it is with this new style: the patron pays the merchant artist to counterfeit his ‘reality’, making the painting echo only the few things he wants remembered, and then he can display this falsehearted icon to deceive an unwitting public. All ‘Truth’ is partial, in that it is limited or exaggerated by one’s own perception, but some ‘truths’ are more ‘partial’ than others. Raphael’s portrait was one.

Books can be wonderful, but one only has to open the jaws of any one of them to find the most intriguing things stuck between its teeth. A few morsels have perhaps been freshly cooked, but most will be the half-digested relics of the author’s last meal, for example: something someone left to disguise an inconvenient lie, a few old misunderstandings, an occasional wild and completely false assumption… all delicately flavoured with a sauce of false metaphors and optimistic connotations. The unwary reader may then be caught between these greedy jaws, and end their days still unaware they have become the unwitting fodder of the ouroboros of ignorance. ‘Ouroboros’? Don’t worry… I hadn’t heard of it before either, until Leonardo enlightened me. It is the legendary serpent that survives by eating its own tail. Or, I suppose, in this case, ‘tale’.

But how to apply this to Surrey? What was his great dream? Well, for a start he wanted to be Edward’s Protector. How could he achieve that? He needed to look as if he were made for the task: bold, daring, loyal, and most important – that the labyrinthine tapestry of his ancestry was stitched with Kings. Indeed, he was already trying to build exactly this image of himself. He had fought valiantly for Henry against the French, being wounded and returning to duty rapidly, even being reprimanded for exposing himself to too much danger. Bold… daring… loyal. A great trio of adjectives. And he had taken to including the arms of King Edward the Confessor within his own, a reference to the two Monarchs he claimed as ancestors.

This was the missing stepping stone. Once I had it, I could cross the river. It was the missing stitch in Ariadne’s thread. The Tree of Knowledge and the Tree of Life, both were in sight, the four faces of Janus accounted for, and I elaborated a plan far more deadly and far more certain even than that of knife or poison. I knew how to get the most fearsome assassin of all to do it for me. Surrey fell in love with the idea of the portrait, placing his head within every noose that threaded my tale..

“His Majesty often writes to me,” the Adelantado said, his breath stitching its habitual pretence with lies, “I think my being an older man with much experience of the world...

Madeira, Tenerife, Cabo Verde, Trinidade… it was as if these were stepping stones in the mighty river of the Ocean Sea, or clues in that featureless maze, stitches that showed the guiding path of Ariadne’s thread. So too is Truth, I reflected… tiny islands of a hidden, but infinite landscape glimpsed peeping from the depths, island ‘facts’ true or falsified that lead us to our beliefs. We never have it all, just spots here and there separated by large protean gaps, and it is from these meagre peeks that we have to imagine how our world really is… Someone of Moorish wisdom, and wiser than most historians once said, “We experience life as a continuity, and only after it falls away, after it becomes the past, do we see its discontinuities. The past, if there is such a thing, is mostly empty space, great expanses of nothing, in which significant persons and events float.”

Apollo portrayed Janus as but two-faced – either/or – but as I had laughingly jested years before, Janus was two-faced about being two-faced. There was another road there apart from that of Apollo, one left in his inconspicuous shadow, and it was this that accounted for the other two gates. The other road was a road not easily accessible to reason. It was the path of instinct and passion, of the natural drives of people, of chaos and the unexpected. It defied the dichotomies of Apollo, scorned narratives, upended the meaning of words. This was the road of Dionysus, and his was the road of the Tree of Life. His two arches looked out on both ‘this’ and ‘that’, and neither ‘this’, nor ‘that’. To know what to do, then, we needed both Apollo and Dionysus.

Language is a gift, a magic wand to conjure obedient Truth from an unruly world, no? Should I not honour it rather than put it in doubt? Well, if for even a moment you believe that narrative is omnipotent, then use your words to describe the drifting emotions and wandering feelings of a lilting lute… and then compare it to those of a lyre! Measure in words the rhapsody of a stream dancing over pebbles with that of rainfall in the forest! Balance the scent of nutmeg beside that of cinnamon… If you want to explore the limits of his power, have Apollo, with his sunbeams, pick out some words from a dictionary and have him express these wonders to someone who has never before experienced them. You will find that the universe of experience is infinitely richer than any universe made of words. Apollo may rule the narrow realm of talk, exposition and confabulation, he may be master of the stories words can tell, but the unfathomable shade of life’s experience has another master, of whom Leonardo was utterly unaware.

If I took that route, would it be enough to insert forever-hidden insults and denunciations in my work? Could I really expect the gods to be able to find these messages sealed beneath the wrinkled bark of a forest of paintings? Was it enough to dream she would then turn the wheel of fortune to make things right? This was so passive. It was to choose Uccello’s path of peace; it was to sheath Excalibur within its scabbard forever… And which gods would even be looking? Nemesis maybe, but Athena would surely just put our daubing to scorn.

“I remember Michelangelo tell me that most people are slaves, and they are slaves because that is what they choose. You have just added the converse of that insight. The real tyrants are in reality the slaves, the peasants, the merchants, the gentry… and this is why killing the tyrant solves nothing. The ordinary people can always find another to put in his place. Kill one tyrant and there will be another thousand all eager to fill the gap. If we fell the tree that tops that soaring mountain of cowardice and cruelty, a bristling forest will vie to replace it.”

“I see both in myself, Majesty, indeed I do. And it is true not only of the word ‘tyrant’. It is the same with those words that sleep with vendetta and nourish it, the words ‘good’ and ‘evil’.” I replied, at length, “They are the obverse and the reverse of the same counterfeit coin. It is counterfeit because there are not just two sides to every experience, each hiding behind the other, there is not only ‘Good’ or ‘Evil’, there is also ‘both Good and Evil’ and ‘neither Good nor Evil’. Janus has four faces, not two. To imagine we can separate the World into things that are True and False, into Heroes and Villains, Saints and Sinners, into Faith and Heresy, this is a great mistake. It is THE Great Mistake, the one that Genesis forbids. Chapter 2, verse 17 says ‘But of the tree of the knowledge of good and evil, thou shalt not eat…’.”

“It is not God who preserves the flaming sword at the gate to Eden to keep us out, it is us. We do it. We, using the Sword of Lucifer, we divide the World into contentious and false opposites, into ‘this or not-this’, into dichotomies, into ‘us’ and ‘them’. We withdrew this sword from the scabbard of Eden. We did it. Even though Genesis tells us that to do this is to eat the Forbidden Fruit, it is to eat the pretentious and troublemaking Apple of the Tree of Knowledge, we still do it. God does not exile us from Eden, we do it ourselves. Which should we savour then: the Fruit of the Tree of ‘Knowledge’, or that of the Tree of Life? Should we choose the Old Knowledge of books and its vast fabricated, false universe built brick by brick from words, or the New Knowledge – that of the universe we actually live in, built of experience?”

My father and my uncle both had told me “Facere quod in se est’ - ‘Do what is in you…’. That should be my guiding star. So what was in me? My crime had been to protect my young cousin Salay, and despite the hue and cry, I could allow myself no regrets. It was perhaps an omen of what my life would be… doing what I must for those who are not strong enough to defend themselves. It rhymed with what I had been taught, after all: and to fight cruelty and injustice, that was certainly in me. This was what I would be, then, I decided. But was it enough? Do what is in you… but the phrase did not say when – it made it sound almost - postponable. Alone the principle felt insipid, and I would not be insipid, that was for sure, I would not postpone what had to be done. Bearing in mind all that had driven me to cross the Ocean Sea, I decided on an addition to the motto. I amended it, adding urgency - ‘Facere quod in se est… et carpe diem.’ – ‘…and seize the day.’ I smiled at the irony – and the defiance - of a paltry slave upending established order, and then quoting the holy language of Latin in justification.

Perhaps there is nothing wrong with ambiguity? Perhaps ambiguous is how the world really is? Perhaps it is nature’s question mark for us to ponder? Certainly nature endows us with strong emotions when it is around. We may find fascination and pleasure in the almost amorphous forms offered by a sponge thrown at a wall, and welcome it as the doorway to invention. But if instead we see ambiguity as a threat, then the anxiety it offers is as no other.

I knew how to find new ways of seeing. The secret was as old as the hills. From the time when people wanted to divine the future, and for this examined the strange forms to be found on the intestines of sheep, listened to the garbled pronouncements of the Oracle of Delphi, gazed into the flickering flame of a lamp, or even the numinous results of Botticelli’s sponge thrown at a wall… such things revealed ways to see that were less reliant on words, ways that were perhaps less favourable to merely gratifying one’s own prejudices - be they positive or negative - better able to offer new metaphors with which to explore the past, present and future.

On my journey to France I had time to look back at my life, as if its events were strewn like acorns at random behind me, fallen from a hole in the sack over my shoulder. Did they form patterns there on the path I had walked? Could I conjure any significance from all that I had been? I wanted to, but would the constellations these acorns formed be more than what Leonardo would once have summoned from the ashes in a fire, or Botticelli from the marks of a sponge thrown against a wall? Would it be more than mere fantasy?

If we regard experience as the fruit of the Tree of Life, then naming slices off part of the wave of this experience, its crest perhaps, as if it were an object. And to be sure it stays apart, we give it a collar with its name on, separating it from its body. This allows us to refer to it, but also seduces us into thinking it is separate from the rest of the wave that moves it to its climax and destruction, it leads us to forget the winds that raised the wave and frothed the crest, to be oblivious to the effects of storms and the tides, and in general ignore the way that ‘crest’ is part of the rest of eternity. No other connections to the crest of this wave are summoned into our minds unless specifically mentioned with other words… and Lucifer is sparing with such sunbeams… So, in short, naming inherently hinders us from understanding the crest in its wholeness.

...at least half of the captives died during the journey, and their poor bodies thrown unceremoniously overboard, where they floated on the crests of waves like my inked letters on this pale parchment.

…to our great sorrow, he died a few days later. His many aliases then became different people, reducing him to mere fragments that glinted in the dark emptinesses of the past, and between them this multitude took credit for all he had done and all he had questioned... He was well aware, too, that this oblivion would be his future, and used to joke that in dying, One-Eye would become Nobody, each the shadow and the highlight of the other.

Unwary those, then, who see light only as illuminated stepping stones in a river of darkness, and who do not realize that darkness too constitutes the stepping stones across a treacherous river of light. Light and shadow are both stepping stone and the perilous gap between.