Memory: May-August 1588

In villages and towns all along the coast of England, piles of wood awaited the torch, and men awaited the first sight of the doom that was coming to devour them.

In the crowded harbor of Lisbon, the ships of the Grande y Felicícisma Armada awaited the order that would send them forth, for God and King Philip, to bring down the heretic queen.

In the waters that separated them, storms brewed, sending rain and heavy winds to lash the lands on both sides of the English Channel.

The Armada was a greater thing in story than it was in reality. The five hundred mighty ships that would bear an unstoppable army to England's shores, their holds crammed with implements of torture and thousands of Catholic wet-nurses for the English babies who would be orphaned by the wholesale slaughter of their parents, were in truth a hundred and thirty ships of varying degrees of sea-worthiness, crewed by the dregs of Lisbon, some of whom had never been to sea before, and commanded by a landsman given his posting only a few months gone. Disease and the depredations of the English scourge Sir Francis Drake had taken their toll on God's weapon against the heretics.

But the worst was yet to come.

In this, the quietest month of the year, when all the experienced seamen had assured the Duke of Medina-Sidonia that the waters would be calm and the winds fair for England, the storms did not subside; instead, they grew in strength. Gales drove the ships back when they tried to progress, and scattered the weaker, less sea-worthy vessels. Fat-bottomed merchantmen, Mediterranean galleys unsuited to the blasts of the open sea, lumbering supply ships that slowed the pace of the entire fleet: the Great and Most Fortunate Armada was a sorry sight indeed.

Delays had slain what remained of May; June rotted away in the harbor of La Coruña, while sailors sickened and starved, their victuals fouled by the green wood of the barrels they were kept in. The commanders of the fleet found new terms by which to damn Drake, who had burned the seasoned barrel-staves the previous year.

In July they sailed again, obedient to God's mission.

Red crosses waved on white flags. The banner of Medina-Sidonia's ship carried the Virgin and a crucified Christ, and the motto Exsurge, Domine, et judica causam tuam! Monks prayed daily, and even sailors were forbidden to take the Lord's name in vain.

Yet none of it availed.

Beacon-fires flared along the coast of England: the Spanish had been sighted. The wind favored the English, and so did the guns; the trim English ships refused boarding engagements, dancing around their ungainly enemy, battering away with their longer guns while staying out of Spanish range. Like dogs tearing at a chained bear, they harried the Spanish up the coast to Scotland, while the storms kept up their merciless assault.

Storms, always storms, every step of the way.

Storms struck them in the Orkneys, and again off the Irish coast, as the Armada fought to crawl home. From Lisbon into the Channel, around all the islands of England, Scotland, and Ireland -- everywhere the fleet went, the wrath of sky and sea pursued.

Sick unto death with scurvy and typhus, maddened by starvation and thirst, the sailors screamed of faces in the water, voices in the sky. God was on their side, but the sea was not. Ever fickle, she had turned an implacable face to them, and all the prayers of the monks could not win her goodwill.

For a deal had been struck, in underwater palaces spoken of only in sailors' drunken tales. The sea answered to powers other than man's, and those powers -- ever callous to human suffering -- had been persuaded to act in favor of the English cause, against their usual disinterested neutrality.

So it was that the skies raged on command and alien figures slipped through the water, dancing effortlessly around the foundering vessels, luring men overboard and dragging them under, discarding many to wash up, bloated and rotting, on the Irish shore, but keeping a few for future amusement. It was difficult to say who had the more unfortunate fate: those who died, or those who lived.

In Spain, bells rang out in premature celebration, while his most Catholic Majesty awaited news of his most holy mission.

In England, the heretic queen rallied her people, while reports trickled in from Drake and the Lord Admiral, speaking of English heroism.

In the turbulent waters of the Atlantic, the remnants of the Armada, half their number lost, captured, or sunk, limped homeward, and took with them the hopes of a Spanish conquest of England.