Hammer of Witches (21 page)

“So I should only summon small things for the time being. Got it. What else?”

“That depends. Do you know how to use more than one spell at a time?”

I thought of my attempts to do so back on the
Santa María.
“Not yet.”

“I haven’t been able to do it, either. But supposedly it is possible, so I thought I would ask. Do you at least know how to summon fantastic settings as well as creatures?”

“No,” I said, full of wonder. “You can do that?”

The girl stopped to sigh at my ignorance. “This may take longer than I thought. I suppose we will have to start at the very beginning.”

“I’m ready. Teach away.”

Catalina crossed her arms and stepped toward me. “Tell me, Señor Infante. How do you summon a mythical creature?”

I took the shoes from under my arm and let them dangle from my fingertips. “To summon a creature . . . you figure out
what the story means. Don’t you?”

“That wasn’t my question. I didn’t ask how
people
summon creatures. I asked how
you
, Baltasar Infante, make a creature come to life. Be specific.”

I swung my arms by my side, thinking. “I just think about what the story reminds me of. Like Titivillus reminded me of my old priest, and Job was me.”

“And the golem you summoned back in the monastery?”

“The golem?” I swallowed. “The golem was my Uncle Diego.”

Catalina must have noticed the sorrow in my voice when I said that, because when she spoke again her voice was milder than usual.

“That’s all well and good, Señor Infante, but it’s not going to help you defeat Amir al-Katib. Linking stories to your own life . . . I’ll admit that’s how I started out, too, when I was young. But what happens if a story
doesn’t
remind you of anyone you know? What if you wanted to summon a siren, for example? I find it doubtful you know any women who have fishtails. I certainly don’t.”

“But you —”

“But I summoned those sirens before, to save your life? Is that what you were going to say? You’re right. I did summon them, but I didn’t do it by thinking about myself or people I know. I did it by thinking more abstractly. In the stories, sirens are lovely creatures that tempt sailors so they can drown
and eat them. I don’t know anyone who acts like that, do you?”

A pretty girl who might secretly be plotting to kill you? Why yes, I did know someone like that. Someone I was talking to right now in fact.

Without waiting for an answer, she went on, “When you consider which characters are weak and which are strong, which are heroes and which are villains, it’s easy to tell what the story is about. Who is the villain in this story? The sirens, of course. And who are the tragic heroes? Why, the men, the sailors. Thus the story is about men’s fears of women and the sea. It’s a common theme. If you spend time looking at enough stories, you’ll find that most female creatures are extremely frightening. Apparently men find us incredibly scary.”

I had never thought of it that way. Smacking a fly off my neck, I said, “I’m not sure I like that interpretation.”

“Why not?”

“It assumes that all men are scared of all women.”

“Aren’t they?”

“I don’t find you scary.”

Catalina broke into laughter as she continued her hike down the beach. “Oh, don’t worry, Señor Infante! You will.”

I followed her down the beach, up steep sandy hills, and through spiny rock formations nearly impossible to cross. An hour later Catalina bent over her knees to catch her breath.

“This humidity is going to kill us,” she said, wiping her brow.

“I have a suggestion,” I said. “If you teach me a new spell, I can summon something for us to ride down the beach. I learn a new spell; you get to stop walking. What do you say?”

Catalina knelt on one of the holey rocks and wiped some sweat off the back of her neck with the end of her cape. “I suppose I can teach you to summon a unicorn. It’s a story for young girls, so you won’t be able to think about yourself.”

“A unicorn?” I said wryly. “Don’t you mean a karkadann?”

“I beg pardon?”

“Never mind. Just stand back and watch.”

I closed my eyes, feeling sweat dripping down my face as I tried to summon the unicorn. But no matter hard I tried, I couldn’t think of anyone I knew who was as wild and elegant as a unicorn, and I couldn’t think of another way to interpret the story. After a minute I cracked open one eye. “Before I start, how about you give me one tiny hint? The story’s about purity, isn’t it? Something like that?”

Catalina didn’t say a word. Facing the forest, she reached back and put a hand against my chest, silencing me.

I followed her gaze inland, toward the edge of the shore where sand dunes started to thicken into forest. Standing there were three copper-skinned men, holding obsidian hatchets.

The three men were
naked but for the strings of beads around their necks. A net of braided cotton was slung over the shoulder of one man, and a second man carried a calabash. The three were taller than I was, and their bodies were thin but sinewy. Their hair was thick, very black, and parted down the middle, and their bangs obscured some of their high, flat foreheads. A red feather puffed out one of the men’s noses. Another nose had a yellow feather, and the third one, blue.

“They’re not wearing any clothing,” I whispered to Catalina.

“I noticed. And look at those axes.”

I did. The stone hatchets each of the men held looked sharp enough to cut solid rock. Vicente Pinzón’s old story echoed through my head:
Barbarians, man-eaters, with bones pierced through their nostrils . . .

The shortest barbarian fell into a crouch and began hooting with laughter. This man was less muscular than the other two, and his yellow-feathered nose bent to one side. The other two
men looked at him quizzically, saying, “Arabuko? What’s going on? Cousin?”

Arabuko wiped the tears of laughter from his smiling, crescent moon eyes, and showed Catalina and me his crooked teeth. “The spirits tease me,” Arabuko said in a strange, mellifluous language. To his cousins he said, “Go on. Start your fishing. I will talk with them.”

The other two men watched Catalina and me with suspicion as they padded down the beach to the ocean. As they went I could hear the two of them whispering — something about pale spirits from the sky.

“Good morning!” Arabuko called down to me and Catalina. Giving us a broad wave, he jogged down the beach in our direction.

“Stay back,” Catalina whispered to me, and the word
E
XCALIBUR
shimmered like a mirage through the humidity. A long sword dropped into her outstretched hand, and she stepped in front of me to protect me from Arabuko.

But the man with the crooked teeth continued to approach us. “There’s no need for weapons!” he said, placing his stone ax in the sand by his bare feet. “See? I’m unarmed. Let us talk.”

Catalina brought her sword closer to her chest as Arabuko looked over her shoulder at the ocean. “How did you get here?” he asked us. “Where are your boats?”

I answered, “We don’t know,” and immediately covered my mouth with one hand. Though I had thought every word in
my native Castilian, the sentence came out in the same flowing tongue Arabuko had been speaking.

“Aha! Another shaman,” Arabuko said, delighted. To my utter shock he continued talking in Spanish. “You are speaking the language of my people, the Taíno. I am Arabuko, shaman of Marién.”

“Baltasar,” I said carefully.

And Catalina said, “Catalina Terreros of Burgos.”

“Excellent!” Arabuko replied. “And what brings you to our island?”

Catalina answered with some hesitation. “Trade, originally. But we fell overboard, and now we seem to be lost.”

“I am sorry to hear that. Truly. But the spirits never do things by accident. They must have brought you here for a reason. A good one, I hope. But you must be hungry. Come! I will bring you to my village.”

Before we could protest, Arabuko picked up his hatchet and jogged back into the forest. Behind me I heard a soft
splash
as the other two men threw their fishing net into the ocean. “Bring them to our village?” one of the men muttered. “After what happened with the other one?”

The other man muttered back, “The spirits have made him mad.”

Catalina brought her sword down to her side as she gazed up at the forest Arabuko had disappeared into. “He’s a Storyteller,” she said of the man. “He must be if he can speak our
language.” I started to march up the beach in front of her. “Wait! Where are you going?”

“To Arabuko’s village,” I answered.

“Didn’t you hear his cousins? They just said he’s a madman!”

“A madman who has food and shelter.” My thoughts then turned to Jinniyah, who I’d left behind. “Maybe someone on this island has seen the
Santa María
or knows where we can find al-Katib. Anyway, Arabuko seems more willing to answer questions than his cousins.”

We looked at the other two men, who were studiously ignoring us. Catalina nodded begrudgingly.

So we followed Arabuko into the forest, where he hummed a jaunty tune over the sound of cooing doves. With barefooted ease the Taíno man skipped down a skinny, irregular path into a labyrinth of vines and crooked tree branches that scratched white lines down our arms as we passed. The stone hatchet I had thought would be used to cleave off my arms or head quickly found itself facing a far more sinister enemy: the undergrowth. Arabuko chopped through the forest easily, each
shink shink
of his ax a rebuke to my over-suspicious imagination.

A clammy mile later, our path opened into a cozy clearing. No, not a clearing — a sanctuary. Broad leaves like stained glass windows let in green light from above. Beyond those leaves, shadows of stems and palm fronds crossed over one another to create a natural spire. A choir of squawking birds echoed through the canopy, and hundreds of flapping wings created
a percussive rhythm for their psalm. For a moment I felt overwhelmed with the knowledge that God’s hands had reached so far to craft this paradise. The Lord’s work was more mysterious than I had imagined, and more beautiful.

Arabuko brushed a heat-desiccated leaf from a moss-covered tree trunk lying supine in the black earth. He sat on the trunk and picked up a dark green fruit from beside it. He tossed the fruit to me.

“Papaya,” Arabuko said in his native language. “Do you have these where you come from?”

I felt the heaviness of the fruit in my hands and squeezed it several times. “No.”

“Then you are in for a treat.” When I tried to bite into it, he chortled. “Make sure you peel the outside first!”

As I tried to rip off the peel of my fruit, Catalina puttered around the clearing, inspecting the undersides of the leaves above her head. They covered her face with a greenish aura. “It’s like Eden,” she said to herself. “Paradise.”

“It is Ayití,” Arabuko corrected her.

“Are we near to the continent?” Catalina inquired. “How far to India or Java?”

Arabuko reached back and scratched his shoulder blade with the hilt of the ax. “I’ve not heard of these places.”

“Then what of Cathay? Surely you know of the Grand Khan.”

“Surely! But I have not. The Cubanacan I have heard of,
but something tells me you’re not talking about them. I have a feeling you are far more lost than you imagine.” Arabuko breathed in deeply, laughing at the thought, and the tiny birds of the forest laughed along with him. His laughter then dissolved into another nonsense song. He stood and disappeared into the jungle.

Arabuko guided us farther inland. As we went Catalina hacked a wider path for us with her sword. After another half hour, perhaps, we emerged into a much larger clearing, on top of a hill that rolled up and down with long mounds of packed dirt. Sharp green and beige leaves stuck out of the mounds, some reaching as high as my waist. The valley below was dotted with about a hundred circular wooden houses with neatly thatched, conical roofs.

“My village,” Arabuko said with pride. “Go on. I will meet you later, after I have spoken to my cacique.”

“Go on where —” I started, but Arabuko ran down the hill so fast that he slid down in places. Catalina and I shrugged and followed him.

We hiked down more carefully than Arabuko did, passing a knee-high wall of flat square stones scratched with the coarse images of squatting, pregnant women. As we got closer to the town we could see the villagers — young women wearing white cotton skirts carrying howling babies with blocks of wood tied against their foreheads, and muscular men with the same coarse, parted hair as Arabuko. Some men carried sloshing buckets of
water made out of gourds that hung from thick branches laid across their shoulders. Others stripped hide off the carcasses of large rodents they’d likely hunted in the forest. In the center of the village a crowd of children played on a well-swept packed-dirt courtyard, bouncing a big brown ball off their shoulders, chests, hips, and heads. We passed a group of middle-aged women with long painted skirts, some cooking over a fire and some making jewelry as they clucked over some rumor. Others took handfuls of what appeared to be some mashed starchy tuber and squeezed out its juice over a gourd bucket.