Hammer of Witches (35 page)

When we were done Jinniyah jumped into one of the house’s hammocks and said, “Amir, come sleep near me!”

“In due time, little one. I should like to speak to the chiefs of this village and thank them for their hospitality.”

“Can’t that wait until morning?” Jinni said, pouting.

Catalina said, “We should come with you.”

My father put up a hand. “Don’t bother. You’ve done enough for today. Sleep. We will have plenty of time tomorrow. You sleep too, Baltasar.”

I smirked. “More stories tomorrow, old man.”

My father gently pushed me down in my hammock. “Yes. But now you must sleep.”

“I guess I am pretty worn out. I mean, ghulahs, a karkadann, and Amir al-Katib all in one day? Even great heroes need their rest.”

“Undoubtedly. Good night, my son.”

“Good night, old man.”

That night under the chirps of the crickets and frogs, in the balmy air of Ayití, I dreamed like a child.

It was quiet when I woke up the next morning. The sun already hung high overhead. It must have been near noon. Calm.

Well, I deserved calm, after everything. A day to sleep in, wrapped in a hammock, rocked by the wind of the tropics.

“A drink would be nice too,” I mused, rolling over on my side. Why not sleep in? What more was there to worry about,
with Amir al-Katib at my side? My father —

I shot up. Amir al-Katib, my father —

“Gone,” I said aloud, stunned by my own declaration. Only Catalina and Jinni remained with me in the room. Tangling myself in my hammock, I stumbled onto the floor and out the door. Nothing. The town was almost empty. Only old people and a few young mothers and their children remained. Other than that, completely quiet.

I ran back inside and shook the others from their sleep. “Catalina! Jinni!”

“Mmph,” Jinni said, draping an arm over her head. Catalina sprang up in her hammock, tense.

“What’s wrong?”

“All of the men are gone. My father —”

Jinniyah bolted out her hammock. “Amir?!”

Catalina brought her fingers to her mouth and fell into thought. “Damn it,” she whispered.

I reached out to her. “What? What’s wrong?”

She closed her eyes and said, “We’ve been so stupid! We were so caught up with finding your father. We forgot.
I
forgot.”

“What? What did we forget?”

“I should have known. This is what I get for letting my guard down!”

I grabbed her upper arm, probably tighter than I should have. “Catalina,
what
should we have known?”

“Pay attention for once, Infante!” she snapped. “We should have known they’d attack La Navidad!”

No. Attack La Navidad? It was impossible. They wouldn’t.

“That doesn’t make sense. Like you said, it wouldn’t be in the Tamo’s interests to attack the fortress. They’d lose trade with Spain. They’d make enemies of Guacanagarí. And King Fernando and Queen Isabel would hunt them down to the ends of the Earth!”

“Didn’t you notice, Infante?” Catalina said bitterly. “We
are
at the ends of the Earth.”

I couldn’t believe it. But if Catalina was right . . .

If she was right —

“They could start a war!” I said, shaking her in her hammock.

“Honestly, Infante,” Catalina murmured. “You just figured that out?”

I paced around the room, cursing myself for oversleeping. On second thought, maybe that wasn’t my fault. I could smell a spicy scent on the air, the same scent I’d smelled back in Palos the night the hameh visited.

Sleeping powder. My father had drugged us.

That was when I caught sight of Jinniyah. She finished pouring our water into pouches and gathered our leftover dinner into my bag.

“Jinni, what are you . . . ?”

“I’m going to find Amir. He could be hurt. He could be — He could be —” She stopped herself and continued packing. “I’m going.” She flew out the door.

“Look,” Jinni said once she was outside. She pointed at the vegetation behind our house at the edge of the village. An army hundreds strong had cut a clear trail through the forest. “They’re going northwest, to where the ships were! We have to follow this trail!”

I said, “Jinni, it took us days to walk here from the bay.”

Catalina slung her own bag over her shoulder. “Yes, but we wasted a lot of time, and we didn’t know where we were going. We had no path, and I know we were walking in circles. If I had to guess, I’d say the distance from here to there is probably less than a day’s march.” She looked up at the noontime sun. “The problem is that we slept late.”

I said, “If they left last night, Caonabó’s troops are probably half a day ahead of us.”

“So what?” Jinni snapped. “We have to stop them! You’re sorcerers! Summon something!”

Catalina said, “Jinniyah, we mustn’t be headstrong. We could be walking right into a war!”

“I understand that. I’m not a child!”

I prodded Jinniyah to the ground with my palms. “Calm down for a second. Catalina’s just being careful. Not all of us here are immortal, you know.”

“But Amir —!”

“Can take care of himself.” I saw Jinniyah’s despairing expression and took her hands. “Besides, I never said we weren’t
going to go.” I turned to Catalina. “Would you like the honor, or should I?”

Catalina spread her arms, and light radiated from her hands. A minute later, we were charging through the forest on the back of an enormous unicorn.

With Catalina and Jinni clinging to the ivory mane in front of me, I watched as the world whizzed by us in a haze of green. The path Caonabó’s armies hacked away followed a river that soon led us through a stretch of hills flanked by mountains on either side. Another hour sent us plunging back into the forest. The shafts of light that broke through the canopy dimmed as clouds formed above our heads. It was going to rain.

Our unicorn galloped forward. We had traveled west from Europe, and now we were making our way to the most westerly tip of the most western island any Spaniard had ever known. West, where the sun went to die. Catalina was right. This really was the end of the Earth.

We could be walking into a war.
Catalina’s words repeated in my head. Caonabó, Anacaona, Antonio, Arabuko, Colón: They could be dead already. My father, too, was old, bent, weak. On the battlefield who could say what could happen?

Faster! Unless we stopped this war now, there would be no end to it. Spain would hunt the Taíno, or the other way around, until the other was annihilated. One way or another the world would never be the same.

A great power approaches in the West: a power that will destroy the world as we know it.
Baba Yaga’s words rang clear against the thunder of hooves. That prophecy had started it all. My father thought I was that dreadful power; at times, I thought it was him. And that misunderstanding almost led to father and son dying at the hands of the other, for no reason.

But what if the Baba Yaga wasn’t talking about either of us? What if, after all that, she was talking about Colón and his men? What if the battle between Spaniard and Taíno was the first of many, the start of a war that would change the course of history?

“And here I thought I was the main character,” I thought. “Maybe I wasn’t even part of the story.”

Under the rain clouds Catalina drove our steed forward.

“Do you smell that?” Catalina said at last. In the hours we had been traveling, not one of us had spoken a word. I was sure Catalina would say something snide about how she hadn’t thought me capable of keeping my mouth shut for more than a minute at a time. Later, maybe. If later ever came.

“Smoke.” Jinniyah brought her hand to her mouth in horror. “Smoke! Something’s on fire!” Jinniyah vaulted from the unicorn. “Come on! We have to find Amir!” she said, and she flew through the vines to the north.

“Jinni, wait!” I leaped off our mount, staggered forward, and clawed my way through the undergrowth.

“You are free, Unicorn,” I heard Catalina say behind me, and she ran behind me down the path through the forest.

Free of the deafening hoofbeats of the unicorn, I could now make out the sounds of the ocean ahead of us. The air reeked with smoke, more bitter than those dried
cohiba
leaves Arabuko’s people so enjoyed. I tripped as the ground beneath me gave way into sand. I gave a final push and tore out of the jungle to the open shore.

A thread of black smoke connected the dark clouds above to a blazing fire below. La Navidad Fortress — little more than a walled village of shacks made of driftwood salvaged from the
Santa María
in the few days we’d been gone — sat aflame on a bluff flanking the east side of the bay. A battle had raged around the fortress earlier, it seemed, but now the battle had moved down to the beach. Not fifty yards in front of me, arrows and wobbling spears flew toward the bay. I cried out as they completed their arcs, taking down my old friends Bartolome and Pérez, who had been running through the sand with crossbows. Bartolome and Pérez fell forward. The Taíno warriors who killed them hollered past, running to the east.

I had barely a moment to experience any grief. Catalina ran up behind me. “Where’s Jinniyah?” she asked me. In the chaos of battle I could see no sign of Jinni.

“We have to find Caonabó,” I said, taking Catalina’s hand. “He’s the only one who can stop this.”

I dragged her down the shore in the direction of the bluff. Below it, toward the eastern end of the bay, the waters were rising into the shape of Uqba. That meant Amir was that way. Maybe Caonabó was there too.

Flocks of bats soared above us as we ran through the arrows and spears. As we neared the eastern end of the bay, the beach became littered with blackened, desiccated remains of corpses that crackled like cicada skins. A shaman I didn’t recognize knelt in the sea foam, the figurine of his wind goddess tied around his forehead. Like Arabuko on the
Santa María,
he called up the hurricane winds and dashed Uqba against the bluff. This shaman must have been from Guacanagarí’s tribe, because one of Caonabó’s men fell on him, beating him with a club. “No!” I shouted, but it was too late for the shaman. Caonabó’s men rushed past me.

Catalina brought a shaky hand to mine. “Infante. Look.”

I looked down next to her, where another bloody Spaniard was lying. “De Torres,” the body said. Antonio. I flew to my fallen friend, who was black with soot and caked-up blood. Two arrows had pierced his side, and sand stuck to his bloodstained beard and dried lips. He tried to sit, then winced, and lay back in the sand.

I reached out, ready to pull the arrows from his side. “Should I . . . ?” I started.

“No, no,” he said in a hoarse, gurgling voice. His breath rattled in his chest between each word. “In a bit. Let me rest. Just for a minute.”

I bent my head in my hands, temples pounding. “Where’s Colón?”

When Antonio laughed, blood spurted from his mouth. “Colón! Lucky bastard. Got out yesterday on the
Niña.
Some Indians in boats said they saw the
Pinta
in a river not far from here. So Colón, Vicente, and some others ran off to find him. And then back to Europe!” Antonio laughed, spitting more blood onto his lips. “But don’t worry. They’ll be back soon, they said. To pick us up, heh.”

“What about Arabuko? My friend. The one who spoke Castilian.”

“Admiral took him. He’ll fetch a nice price at market, I’ll expect. Not that any of us decent, hardworking folk will see a penny of it . . .” Antonio dissolved into another fit of gurgling coughs.

I removed my hands from my head. “What do you mean, ‘price at market’?”

“Servants, Colón says. Slaves, more like. Colón took a half-dozen or so. They’ll get a good price, too, if they make it to port alive. Skinny things like that might not do so well on a sea voyage.”

I stared dumbly at Antonio’s wounds. Arabuko had told me once,
“Better to die than be taken. To be taken is worse than death.”
And he’d once said,
“Your man Colón . . . he frightens me.”
I closed my eyes, praying for my friend the shaman, and cursing myself for being too late to save him.

“Too bad the women ran off.” De Cuellar let out a rattling breath, remembering. “They would have fetched a pretty penny, back east.”

The five women the crew had kidnapped. I looked over at Catalina. She was looking away.

“Hey, Luis,” Antonio rasped, looking out at nothing.

I barely paid attention. “I introduced Arabuko to Colón,” I said. “I told him we were trustworthy. We
were
trustworthy. I —”

It was then that I noticed that Antonio had turned his head toward the ocean. His eyes were glassy, and his chest no longer seemed to move. I bent over, put my head against my friend’s stained body. No heartbeat. Dead.

I clenched my teeth against the tears and smashed a fist against his silent chest. “I trusted you!” I said into the man’s shirt. “You were better than that! I trusted you!”

“Infante,” Catalina said. “Come on. We have to go.”

Catalina put her arms under mine and pulled me to my feet. I flung sideways out of her grasp and sent her stumbling backward.

“No, Cat! You don’t get it! I trusted them! You don’t understand!”

“I do,” she said.

“You don’t.”

“I do!” She closed her eyes against her tears. “Please, Baltasar, I do.”

My legs gave way then, and I collapsed into the sand. “He was my friend.”

And there was nothing more to say. Catalina put her arms around me, and I cried without sound for some time.