Hammer of Witches

by Shana Mlawski

Rodrigo Sanchez came up beside him, holding his knobby arms. “We saw something. In the sky. Some of the crew’s saying it’s a demon.” Rodrigo’s voice sounded thin and warbly, his laughter loud and brittle. “To tell you the truth, another scream like that and I might start to agree with them!”

  Behind him Pedro Terreros hmphed, and Colón pursed his mouth with the same scorn. “Superstition on top of superstition,” the admiral muttered. “No demons will come near these ships. This journey has been blessed by God Himself.”

  Another tattered shriek ripped across the sky, and I felt Jinniyah’s fingernails digging into my forearm. “Bal, did you hear that? It’s a . . . it’s a . . .”

  She couldn’t say it, but I knew. I knew that cry. It was the same one I heard in my bedroom that night. Two yellow eyes in my window. The smell of incense and cinnamon.

  “Uncle,” I said. “You said you would tell me a true story. You said you would tell me about Amir al-Katib.”

  “I did, Baltasar.”

  Antonio de Cuellar barreled down the forecastle stairs and swung his tree trunk of an arm upward. “There she is!”

  And there she was. The hameh: a ragged black hawk with a scimitar of a beak and piercing gold eyes surrounded by smoke. It loosed its horrendous shriek — the sound of women murdered in their beds or spirits clawing in vain as the earth swallowed them. It threw open its wings. Though the night was clear, its feathers were slick and shining, even from a distance.

  My insides shook, and a jerky laugh escaped my mouth. “It’s blood,” I said, realizing.

  A dozen heads snapped to look at me. Jinniyah tugged on my arm. “Luis, don’t talk like that. It scares me.”

  I stared down at my fingers. Once they were stained black from a feather found on the steps of my uncle’s workshop. At the time I’d thought it was ink on the feather. But it wasn’t.

  It was blood. Black blood.

  “Look out!”

  The full force of Jinniyah’s slight body smashed into my side, and it was moments before I realized we were both on the floor.

  “Sorry,” Jinniyah said under her breath. Blood dribbled through her tunic where the hameh had buried its claws.

  I opened my eyes wide. “Jinni!” I said, in my panic forgetting to call her by her false name.

  “Bal, above you!” she cried.

  I only had a fraction of a second to look with horror at the eyes of the hameh. Smoldering with some unknown fire, they aimed at me with unwavering hatred. That look told me everything. The hameh wasn’t here for just anyone. It wasn’t here for the crew. No.

  It was here for me.

  The bird sliced through the sky, lunging at its prey. I dived sideways and threw my arms across my face.

  “Luis!”

  A bone-crunching noise sounded over the din.

  “Get away from him, you bastard!”

  Loosing a muted squawk, the hameh reared up and shook its head against the blow. Behind it Antonio de Cuellar clenched his teeth as he finished the follow-through of his carpenter’s hammer, now damp with black blood. “Go back where you came from, demon!”

  The hameh flapped higher, crowing in defiance. Then the bird stopped in its place and cocked its head toward the southwest as if hearing a voiceless call. It reeled around and raced off into the western horizon, dripping a trail of bloody feathers behind it. Rodrigo Sanchez ran out of the admiral’s cabin, Colón’s arquebus in hand. He aimed the gun at the demon and fired — too little, too late.

  “Are you all right, Luis?” Antonio asked me. I barely heard the question. I was staring down at the puddle right in front of me. Hameh. Cinnamon. Blood. Black blood.

  A whimper broke me out of my stupor. Then I remembered. “Jinni!”

  I rushed up to the ruined heap that was Jinniyah. Quickly I fumbled at her belt and servant’s tunic toward the wounds those deadly talons had inflicted.

  “No no no. Jinni. Come on. You can’t leave me now.”

  From her place on the floor, Jinniyah gave me a sad smile. “Silly boy. Don’t cry.” She cringed to a seated position and motioned at her bloody side. “Look. I’m not even hurt.”

  I could hardly bring myself to look at her. But she was right. Under her tunic, under the drying black blood, Jinniyah’s brown skin was as smooth and whole as ever.

  Murmurs were beginning to buzz around me — angry, frightened murmurs. I looked around and found myself surrounded by the men of the Santa María. Colón and Juan de la Cosa broke into the circle. “It’s over,” the master-at-arms said. “Now get some sleep. We’ve had enough excitement for one day.”

  “Sleep!” Bartolome exclaimed in his Portuguese accent. “How are we supposed to sleep when there’s demons —”

  Colón cut him off before he could finish. “That was no demon. It is a type of Oriental bird described in Marco Polo’s writings of the Indies. It is called a black heron or somesuch. It is a good sign. It is a sign of land.”

  “Bullshit!” I heard Salcedo whisper.

  Colón continued, “And if I hear the word ‘demon’ again, whoever says it will spend the remainder of the journey locked down in the hold. Do you understand?”

  As the crowd broke out into new arguments, I noticed the Pinta and Niña sidling up beside the Santa María. Vicente probably wanted to see what the fuss was about, but I knew Martín would use the opportunity to pick another fight with Colón. Now was my chance to get away before anyone noticed, so I hooked my arm around Jinniyah’s and brought her down into the hold.

  It was pitch black down here, so Jinniyah briefly changed into her genie form so we could see each other under the eerie light of her fiery hair.

  “Are you all right?” was the first thing I asked her.

  “I’m fine,” she said. “I told you.”

  I pushed one hand against the side of my forehead. “You scared the hell out of me.”

  “I know. I’m sorry. But I told you genies are hard to kill. What was it he used to call me back then? ‘Durable,’ I think.”

  “Who?” I asked her, but the answer announced itself the moment I spoke the word.

  Embarrassed, Jinniyah avoided my eyes. “Well, Amir, obviously.”

  We stood there a while without speaking. “That was his hameh, wasn’t it? Amir’s.”

  Jinniyah sat on a nearby crate and brought her knees up to her chin. “I think so.”

  My vision caught on my forearm. Under the black light of Jinniyah’s fire, I could see maroon dots beading around three scratches the hameh had left above my wrist. My eyes locked on them, unable to look away.

  I lifted my arm so Jinniyah could see the wound. “All right, Jinni,” I said, very carefully. “Why does my father . . . why does Amir al-Katib want me dead?”

  When a person first discovers that his father is trying to kill him, he will be overcome by a variety of emotions. First comes surprise — that one’s only natural — which defers to anger, confusion, and fear.

  But that night when I climbed up the ladder that led out of the Santa Marías hold, I found myself overtaken by a different emotion: vindication. This whole time I had been right about my father, while Jinni, Diego, and the Baba Yaga were dead wrong. If I was the hero of this story, Amir al-Katib was clearly the villain. I had known it in my gut from the first time I held his necklace.

  As for what I was going to do when I confronted this villain . . . well, I hadn’t made a decision about that yet.

  Rodrigo Sanchez awaited me as I climbed out of the hold. Under the moonlight his face was pasty, and his neck seemed very long.

  “The admiral wants to talk to you.” Rodrigo’s Adam’s apple bobbled in his neck. “He seems angry? I could be wrong.”

  Something told me he wasn’t wrong about this. But Colón’s anger was about the least of my worries, so I crossed the deck and entered the admiral’s cabin. Colón’s back faced me as he stood behind his desk staring out the porthole that pointed home.

  “Tell me, Interpreter,” Colón said into th
at porthole. “Have you ever heard the story of Job?”

  “Yes, sir.”

  “Then tell it to me.”

  Although I didn’t quite grasp the point of this exercise, I did as he ordered. “It’s about Job, a Jew. He was the most righteous man in the world. God pointed him out to Lucifer and said, ‘Here is a pious man even you cannot corrupt.’ Satan replied that it was easy for Job to be pious. He was rich, had a family, many friends. Without those things, the Devil argued, Job would never stay faithful.”

  I stopped there, not knowing if I should continue. “Go on,” Colón said in a cold monotone.

  Looking away from him I continued, “God took Satan’s bet. He tested Job. He took everything from him: killed his family, destroyed his home. After a while, Job’s friends left him. They thought he was cursed.” The faces of my dying aunt and uncle passed quickly before me then. In my mind I saw their blood seeping onto my bedroom floor. In a quieter voice I added, “They were right. He was cursed.”

  “Go on, Storyteller,” the admiral said with some malice. “What happened to Job? Did he keep his faith? Did he remain loyal when troubles fell upon him?”

  I didn’t answer. All I could think of was how disloyal I had been, how I’d practiced magic on this ship against the admiral’s orders.

  The admiral answered for me by smacking a pile of papers off his desk. “Job, who had promised — nay, swore — to heed the word of the Lord . . . Our man Job broke the rules. He demanded an explanation for his suffering. He started questioning the Lord. Can you imagine anything more insolent than this, de Torres? Can you imagine anything more abominable than questioning your maker?”

  “No,” I murmured, feeling my face go warm with shame.

  “‘How dare you?’ God said to Job. ‘How dare you question the one who made you from nothing, the one who created and bounded the seas? I am the one who created the skies and the earth! I am the one who made the sea beast Leviathan, a dragon large as a mountain, with scales of iron and breath made of fire! I created all of this! I, not you, Job!’”

  Colón’s face was red as he paused in his speech, and he held onto the back of his chair as he caught his breath. “Do you understand this story, Luis?” he asked me.

  “Yes,” I murmured, but Colón pretended not to hear.

  “On this ship, I am your God, de Torres! I am the one who created this voyage! Not you, not Martín Pinzón! I am the one who makes the rules. And when I say, ‘Do not use your magic, Luis, do not use it under any circumstances,’ I mean: Do not use your magic, Luis, not under any circumstances! And when I say, ‘Do not summon one of your infernal creatures, Sorcerer,’ do you know what I mean?”

  “Sir, I —”

  “You better believe I damn well mean it!”

  Colón’s anger hit me like an invisible wave of power, so strong that it pushed me back almost into the door. I waited for the blood to rush out of the admiral’s face before muttering, “I know you think I summoned it. But I didn’t. I didn’t summon the hameh.”

  “What did you call it?”

  “The demon. I didn’t summon it. I swear to you.”

  “Then who did?” The man dropped into his chair with a huff. “If you didn’t call the demon to these ships, why did it come here?”

  “I don’t know.”

  “And why did it focus its attention on you, and you alone?”

  “I don’t know!”

  Colón let out another huff through his nose and crossed one leg over the other. “This is your last warning,” the admiral said without looking at me. “What you did tonight might have caused a mutiny. And I have no problem with having mutineers hanged. Do you understand me?”

  “Yes, but —”

  “Do not question me, Job. You are dismissed.”

  The next day marked the seventh week of our journey, and the ships seemed to straddle two worlds. One was normal, a world where you woke up, did your duties — almost without thinking, like the ropes were part of your body. At dusk you chanted your prayers, ate your supper, dropped to sleep. Day after hazy day it was the same.

  That was the normal world for us on that seventh week — but there was another world hiding beneath the surface. This world was a spirit world, one you could only see through the dead eyes of a sailor. It was a world of demons, of fear and false promises, of ghost ships cursed to roam the Atlantic forever. The bird — once a symbol of hope and nearby land — had degenerated into something more dire. Each time any of us saw a petrel or a seagull, we held onto our brooms and thought of Hell.

  Before long we were eight weeks at sea, and the men had grown sick as well as weary. Scurvy had painted Antonio’s teeth red, and open sores dripped pus down his legs. Every night Martín came aboard to rail at Colón for his errors, but there wasn’t much the admiral could do to solve the problem. The wind around us had died down almost to nothing, leaving us nothing to do but swim beside the ships and wait. Jinniyah, afraid of the water, looked down on me from above, her boy’s eyes wide and full of worry.

  The wind returned to us on week nine, but it was weak and brought only halfhearted cheers. By this point even the admiral looked ill. He had turned waxy, seeming to melt anew each day under the autumn sun. And each night at dusk he seemed to droop a little more as he preached patience during our prayers at vespers.

  Patience. It was the word of the hour. But there was another word too, sitting unspoken on everyone’s lips —“mutiny.” The threat of it worsened every night when Martín Pinzón came aboard to discuss strategy with Colón.

  Week nine and a half, and I could hear Martín yelling through the cabin wall I was leaning against. It was the same speech he always made. By now I could recite it by heart.

  “Why do we not turn back?” the Pinta’s captain challenged the admiral. “We are nearing the point of no return. If we turn back now, we’ll have enough water to survive.”

  “You forget your place, Captain,” the admiral warned. “The queen put me in charge, not you. I’ll have you remember that this is my mission —”

  “But this is my crew! And they are dying, Colón! Look at them! Most of these men have been sailing with me for years now, and I will see to it that they sail for many more. The time is soon coming for them to make a choice. And I think we both know where their loyalty lies.”

  I adjusted my posture outside the cabin door. It seemed this old play had a new scene, one I had never heard before.

  “Is that a threat?” Colón said in the cabin.

  “It is the truth. Tell the queen that, if you make it home to see her.”

  Martín exploded out of the cabin and onto the deck. “Out of my way, Jew,” he said as he blew past me. The admiral chased after him, his face peeling and covered with sweat.

  “Pinzón!”

  Martín stopped short in front of the gangplank leading to his Pinta and held up three fingers. “Three days, Colón. You have three days to find land.”

  “Or what? Do you actually believe you frighten me?”

  Martín’s thin mouth twisted up in a smile, and he answered by striding across the gangplank.

  On the Santa María, Colón pushed his lips together so hard that I could see them shaking with rage. I felt myself trembling inside, too. Three days. In three days Martín would take over, lead the mutiny himself, and sail the lot of us back to Europe. Europe, the land that had exiled me. Europe, where the Malleus Maleficarum waited.

  Of course the thought of reaching Cathay didn’t ease my mind much either. There was a hameh out there, somewhere beyond the horizon, and a long-lost father who for some reason wanted me dead. And I couldn’t forget about the evil being that the Baba Yaga’s prophecy had predicted — but I had begun assuming he and Amir were the same person.

  I dealt with the pressure the only way I knew how. I trotted over to the mainsail and said, “Hey, Antonio. I remembered something else about that flower girl, Dirty Mary. Did I ever tell you she had a twin sister?” But I felt the story wilting as I
told it, and the words tasted like rot inside my mouth.

  “Sorry, kid,” the old carpenter said, barely able to hold onto the hammer falling out of his hand. “The only story I want to hear is the one about the sailors reaching the Indies.”

  That night as I tried to sleep, I lay on the deck of the Santa María feeling completely trapped. Above the stars winked at me, but they provided no comfort. They were only pallid reminders of how small I was in comparison to the wrathful black ocean.

  In my hard and desolate sleep I dreamed of a dark, faceless man. A windswept beard covered his chin, and layers of robes pooled around his feet. Two corpses — my aunt and uncle — lay dumb and glassy-eyed beside him, and their mouths opened in silent cries. Then the faceless man reached out to suffocate me, and I heard the hameh’s scream, and I awoke on the Santa Marías deck calling out, “Jinni!”

  Jinniyah’s human eyes fluttered open at the sound. She was lying next to me under a gauzy night sky, squished in a fetal position between me and the rail. “Hi, Bal,” she said in a sleep-drenched voice. “What happened? Did we find land?”

  I pushed my hands madly over my hair and looked around at the dozens of crew members sleeping around us on the deck. On my other side, Antonio muttered something in his sleep, half-woken by my outburst, but it seemed I had bothered no one else.

  “No, Jinni,” I whispered so no one would hear. “We haven’t found land. Something’s wrong.” I don’t know how I knew, but I knew. On an instinct I reached back and flung my bag open.

  It was empty. Completely empty. My coin purse, my money — even my hat had disappeared. And the scroll, that script-covered scroll, the one sealed shut with the image of the hammer . . .

  “Gone,” I said, barely able to comprehend the word.

  Jinniyah brought a shaking hand to her mouth. “Oh, Bal. Your money!”

  “Forget the money!” I said in a panicked whisper. “They’ve got the scroll! The one from the Malleus Maleficarum. My whole life is on that paper! Who my father is, who I am. What I am.”

  I buried my head in my hands. They were here. Here. On this ship, hiding in the shadows. They were going to find me. They were going to torture me. They were going to —