Hammer of Witches

by Shana Mlawski

  “The spell was powerful, I’ll admit. But it doesn’t mean —”

  I barely heard the rest. All I could hear were the invisible creatures whispering behind us in the forest. Somewhere in that jungle, Amir al-Katib could be waiting, girding himself to destroy his monstrous son.

  I threw an angry hand toward the forest. “Hell, maybe that’s why he abandoned me in the first place! Amir must have known I’d grow up to be trouble.”

  “Let’s not jump to conclusions,” Catalina said. Needless to say I didn’t listen.

  “Jinni and the Baba Yaga wanted me to be the hero. But he’s the hero! I’m the villain! Everything I go near I destroy. You said before that I ruined your life — and you’re not the only one.”

  “Infante, please. That’s enough.”

  “Why? Amir’s right! I’m a curse! That’s why the Malleus Maleficarum are after me! That’s why my aunt and uncle are dead!”

  “I said enough!” Catalina shouted. “Stop it! That’s enough!”

  Exhausted, I studied my sandy fingers, waiting for them to steady themselves. They wouldn’t. I rolled them into fists and closed my eyes. “I’m so sick of this. It’s too much. You know?”

  Catalina’s pitying face was draped in shadow. “Yes. I know.”

  I shifted my weight in the sand. “Then what do you think?”

  “About the prophecy?”

  “About everything.”

  Catalina paused, then looked me stark in the eyes. “I think you may be right. You may be the source of evil the Baba Yaga prophesied. You may destroy the world as we know it.” The girl tossed her braid over her shoulder and shrugged. “Then again, you may not. Amir al-Katib may be right; you may be right. Perhaps I’m right, or all of us are wrong. We might be wrong about al-Katib, for all I know. But it seems to me that al-Katib is after you, and his actions are being determined by the way he interpreted the prophecy. So you need to be on your guard.”

  “You’re saying that, even if we figure out who the evil being really is, it won’t matter because my father will try to kill me no matter what.”

  “I’m saying that the truth, in this case, is irrelevant. It’s your father’s interpretation that matters.”

  I picked up a handful of the shadowy sand and watched streams of it seep out from between my fingers. “So I’ll find him and convince him his interpretation is wrong.”

  Catalina tilted her head and said, “It’s certainly not the worst plan I’ve ever heard. First you’ll need to sharpen your Storytelling skills so you can better protect yourself against his attacks. Then you’ll need to use your spells to break through his defenses and get close enough to him to talk.” The girl nodded to herself. “Yes. Yes, it could work. Although . . .”

  Catalina trailed off and breathed in sharply as she brought her fingers to her mouth. “Although . . . ?” I asked her.

  “I was thinking. Ideally you’d be able to talk to al-Katib and convince him he’s in the wrong. But if your father is anything like mine, he may not be open to reason. There are some who would rather die than admit they made a mistake.” The girl sighed. “As much as I hate to say it, you may have to prepare yourself for the possibility that discussion won’t be enough. In the end it may come down to ‘kill or be killed.’”

  Kill or be killed. In the back of my mind, I’d always known my story might end this way. But faced with the reality of tracking down my father, confronting him, and killing the man in cold blood . . .

  “You can’t be serious,” I whispered. “That’s . . . that’s not an option. It’s not even possible.”

  Catalina considered me, then offered me a little smile. “Hopefully it won’t come to that. But it’s not impossible. If it comes down to it, I think you will be able to defeat your father. He may be one of the greatest Storytellers who ever lived. He may have decades of experience on you and a horde of monsters he can summon at will.”

  “I’ve got to tell you, Catalina. This is not making me feel better.”

  “I said he may have those things, but you have something better.” Under the pall of shadow, the girl’s eyes glittered in the moonlight. “You have me.”

  I awoke the next morning sweaty and in pain. Catalina had decided to rouse me by kicking my lower back. “Rise and shine, Infante! The sun’s been up for hours.”

  “Watch it,” I murmured, opening my eyes. Bits of sand had attached themselves to my eyelashes in the night; I found I could barely see. “What’s the hurry?”

  “The hurry is I don’t want to live on this beach forever. I’m going to see if I can find the Santa María and the other ships, or perhaps some sign of civilization. You may stay here if you want; that’s your prerogative. But I am leaving.”

  Catalina pulled on her boots and started hiking down the shore. I peeled my face off the ground, spit chunks of sand off my tongue, and slapped more sand out of my hair. “Wait!” I called after Catalina. “I thought you were going to teach me Storytelling!”

  I stuck my shoes under one arm, quickly rinsed my sandy hair out in the ocean, and ran down the shore in the direction of the October sun. Catalina was currently standing on a sand dune, thumb locked into one of her belt loops as she surveyed the ocean.

  “If we’re lucky,” she said, “someone in the crew spotted this island, and Colón’s trying to find somewhere safe to lay anchor.”

  Spotted the island? I wondered how could anyone miss it. Shielding my eyes against the white morning, I took in the view of the verdant peaks that rose out of the forest in front of us. The sight was so beautiful I almost ran and embraced it. Oh, green, green! After nine gray weeks at sea I’d forgotten such a sublime color existed. Crowned by ocean mists, the kingly face of the mountains grinned up at cloudless skies. Three cormorants soared above us before swooping down for breakfast in the sea.

  Catalina and I traveled down the shoreline, avoiding washed-up seaweed and jellyfish as we went. “Where do you think we are?” I asked her as we walked.

  “Java, perhaps. Or Cipango. Although the lack of pagodas is worrisome.”

  “What’s a pagoda?”

  “A building with golden roofs stacked on top of one another. Marco Polo spoke of them in his writings on the East. Polo wrote also of an archipelago of inhabited islands off the farthest coast of the Asian continent. If we are on one of them, surely there is someone here who can direct us to the mainland.” Yet I heard a note of doubt in her voice, doubt modulating into despair.

  “Why’d you decide to help me, anyway?” I asked her. “Afraid I’d leave you all alone on this island?”

  “Hardly! I was simply bored, that’s all.”

  I supposed boredom was as good a motivation as any, but I couldn’t help but think there was more to it than that. Maybe she really was afraid, foundering in the dark like I was. Maybe she was searching some heroic quest to shape her life, to give it meaning. Or maybe, after nine weeks of keeping herself distant from the crew, she was simply looking for a friend.

  I raced in front of the girl and walked backward so I could face her. “What are you going to teach me? Storytelling-wise, I mean.”

  Catalina advanced past me, tipping her head toward the sea. “Before anything you’re going to have to build up some stamina. Is it a wonder you almost drowned when you summoned the Leviathan? One must walk before learning to run, Señor Infante.”

  “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 beginn
ing.”

  “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 EXCALIBUR 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!”