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.
A squadron of Taíno men raced across the beach carrying spears and spear-throwers. As they rushed past us I recognized some of them from the courtyard in Maguana. Otherwise the beach was mostly empty, except for the dead. The battle, it appeared, was almost over.
Catalina wiped tears from her cheeks and said, “I’m going to look for Jinniyah.”
I didn’t answer. Only focused on Antonio’s broken body. Catalina’s face creased with worry. “You’ll be all right here?”
“Yes.”
She watched me for a moment longer, then stood. “Take cover. Caonabó’s men probably won’t attack you for fear of breaking the alliance your father. But be careful. I’ll only be a moment. I’ll bring Jinniyah, and your father, if she’s found him.”
She waited for me to say more. I didn’t. She left. I listened to the breathing of the sea.
“My son.”
I lifted my head. Not far away, camouflaged by the forest behind him, my father sat on a rock. “Baltasar.” He stood. Stumbled. Fell back to his seat. All of his summoning had weakened him.
I scrambled to my feet. “Don’t move! I’ll come to you! Don’t move!”
I tripped across the beach. Buckets of sand shot out from under my feet as I ran. “Father.”
The old man’s breathing was shallow. He seemed to be supporting his entire weight on one arm. “It seems I have overexerted myself,” he said. “Your mother always told me never to summon more than one story at once. I never listened.”
“Jinni was looking for you.”
“I saw her. It was only just now that I had enough strength to call out to anyone.”
I scanned over the perimeter, searching for Jinni. All I could see was fire and sea and corpses. “How could you do this?” I said to my father. “How could you join Caonabó?”
“I didn’t have a choice, Bali,” he answered patiently.
“Of course, you did! I thought you’d given up your old ways. You said in the cave fighting for revenge is folly!”
“It didn’t do this for revenge. I did it because of the prophecy. The cacique and I agreed, these Spanish men are the ones the Baba Yaga spoke of. They are demons with the power to destroy the world.”
“They are my friends. You murdered my friends!”
“I am sorry, Bali. When you are older, you will understand.”
Understand? I would never understand this. Never!
I was about to rage against my father more, rail against him for all the evil things anyone ever did to me, and for all the evil, stupid things one man ever did to another, when a funny thing happened. I heard a quick, blunt noise, and my father’s eyes went blank. He reached up near his heart. When he removed his hand, it was covered with a wet maroon stain. He fell sideways off the rock.
I stared down at him. A figure was standing behind him in the forest. There, Rodrigo Sanchez held Colón’s arquebus. “The admiral left his gun at the fortress,” he said. “Lucky I found it before one of the Indians, eh?”
Immediately an arrow flew across the sky and hit Rodrigo in the neck. I cried out as he made a strangled noise and fell down in the sand.
I heard the sound of running behind me. Catalina and Jinni were racing over.
“Amir!” Jinniyah threw herself down beside him.
“Was that a gunshot?” Catalina exclaimed.
I dropped to the ground and took my father’s hand with both of mine. It was shaking like mad. A fine layer of sweat embalmed the man’s face, and I could hear him wheezing through his teeth.
Amir raised his arm feebly toward Jinniyah. “Baltasar, you must do something for me. Before —”
I shut my eyes against the word. “Tell me what you need me to do.”
He brought his free hand up to Jinniyah’s tear-burned face. “This girl. This wondrous girl. You must help her. Otherwise when I die she dies too.”
“What do you mean?” I looked from my father to Jinniyah, who seemed to be growing transparent. And I understood. “You summoned her,” I said, full of wonder.
My father caressed Jinni’s cheek as she wept into it. “Yes. She was one of the first creatures I ever summoned. I was a small child, and I had so wanted to summon a genie to grant me wishes. But a true genie is a being of incredible power, and I did not know how to control him. He would not do a thing for me, just stood there and looked at me like I was nothing.”
Exactly the same thing that happened to me when I’d summoned my own genie on the Santa María. My father continued, “But then I read about the creature called the half-genie. A being half-spirit and half-human, who could not fit well in either world.” The man blinked back some tears. “That was a story, my son, that I could understand all too well.”
By now Jinniyah had faded so much that I could see almost right through her. My father’s breathing was becoming more labored. He squeezed my hand tighter and said, “You must keep the spell going, Baltasar! I need to know that when I’m gone, that girl will live on. That she and my son will live on, together!”
“I will, Father,” I said. I closed my eyes and thought of the story of the half-genie, and of Jinniyah. Back in Palos I’d misunderstood her, doubted her. A genie without the power of wishes? What was the use of that?
But now I understood what her power was. There was power in being from two worlds at once. Someone like her might understand both the spirit world and the world of man, though neither race would accept her. There was power in that — a different kind of power, but a power all the same.
“You silly boy,” I heard Jinniyah say. I opened my eyes and watched as the fading Jinniyah pressed herself against my father. “If you wanted a genie to grant you wishes, you should have summoned King Suleiman’s ring.”
It took me a moment to grasp what she had said. “Jinni, what did you say?”
The girl looked up from my father, her face almost completely black from her tears. “Bal, don’t you know any stories? King Suleiman had a ring that gave him power over all genies, and he used it to force them to grant him wishes.”
I looked up at Catalina, who was hanging back not far from my father. “Catalina,” I ordered, “summon a genie — now.”
Catalina seemed to understand my urgency. She closed her eyes and the word IFRIT appeared in Arabic before her. The black spirit she summoned was as tall and muscular as the one I had summoned back on the Santa María, but somehow hers looked angrier. I closed my eyes and thought of the story of King Suleiman’s ring, which quickly appeared and dropped into my hand. I forced the ring onto my finger and ran in front of the genie.
“I have Suleiman’s ring,” I said. “So you have to do as I say. How many wishes do I get?”
The genie was impassive. Slowly, he raised one finger.
“Fine.” And without thinking I said, “This is my wish. No one else is going to die today — not my father, not anyone. Save him, Genie. Save them all!”
The genie looked down on me and folded his arms, but nevertheless he lowered his head in a nod. I noticed Rodrigo’s body glowing blue on the ground not far from me. He sat up, yanked the arrow from his throat, and looked up at the genie. His mouth opened in terror as he looked upon the spirit. He fumbled for his gun and hightailed it into the forest.
“Amir?” Jinniyah said, and I saw my father’s body glowing too. Jinniyah helped him to a seated position, and he rubbed his once-wounded stomach.
“It appears I am healed,” my father said, and he chuckled at the thought. “You are a smart one, my son. Your mother called you Baltasar so you’d be wise.”
Behind Catalina, dozens of dying sailors and soldiers were rising from the ground. They felt around their bodies for their wounds, and — finding nothing — began attacking one another again. Each time they died, they glowed blue and returned to life, but they still screamed in agony when hit by a spear or an arrow.
“Stop!” I yelled at them, but they didn’t hear me or wouldn’t listen. I asked my father,
“Where are Anacaona and Caonabó?”
He answered, “Last I saw them, they were up at the fortress. Why?”
“Stay here,” I told Catalina and Jinni. “Make sure my father doesn’t move.” I began running across the beach toward La Navidad.
“Wait, Bal!” Jinni cried behind me. “Where are you going?”
“To stop this.”
I crossed the beach and climbed up the cliff where the remains of the fortress smoldered. Taíno men roamed about the cinders, picking up bits from the wreckage. A backlit figure with its hair tied high on its head in a warrior’s knot oversaw the looting. “Useless,” the figure said, tossing away some halfburnt junk from the Santa María.
“Anacaona,” I said to her.
The Taíno queen turned around and beamed at me. “Why, if it isn’t our young shaman!” With her face smeared with a swathe of deep crimson — dye or blood, I wasn’t sure — she might have been a hameh. The priestess clapped her hands together to remove the ash from her palms. “You came to gaze upon our glorious work?”
I looked over the hundreds of bodies that still lay around us and below us on the beach. The genie was able to save those who were dying, but not those who were already dead.
“Call off your men,” I told the Taíno priestess. “This battle is over. I’ve made it so no one else will die today.”
“Oh, have you?” Anacaona said, and she looked over her shoulder to see a half-burned sailor from the Niña staggering out of the fortress wreckage. Anacaona whipped the bow off her back and let an arrow fly at the sailor. I almost cried out as it pierced through his skull. The man’s body glowed momentarily. Then he removed the arrow from his head.
As the sailor ran off, Anacaona exclaimed, “Very nice, little shaman! I suppose this battle is over.” She stepped over to the edge of the cliff and shouted to her troops, “Put down your weapons! We have won!”
Below the soldiers of Maguana cheered. They gathered their loot and ran off into the forest. I saw Guacanagarí there, too, limping as he ordered his troops to return to Marién. Anacaona was about to go home when I snatched her hand and pulled her backward.
Hammer of Witches Page 26