Hammer of Witches (2 page)

There were eyes in
my bedroom window. Yellow ones — bodiless and surrounded by smoke. I was fourteen, and it was summer. I had been dreaming about the war.

Hundreds of years ago Moorish armies had taken Granada from its Christian rulers, and from the time I was born our King Fernando and Queen Isabel tried to reconquer it. In my dream I was there at the final battle, surrounded by grim men on tall black horses that stomped, impatient, on the sun-baked ground. Tangled beards hid the men’s dark faces. Splashes of blood defiled their robes. Behind them I saw mountains and burning trees, and the red fortress Alhambra waiting silently for battle.

And it came. The Moorish soldiers raised their voices in one ululating chorus and whirled their sabers above their heads. At once their horses pounded, screaming, past me. I ran from them. I tripped. I felt a sword slicing through my neck —

Then a sudden shriek ripped me from my nightmare, and I awoke to see a pair of yellow eyes shining through my bedroom window. Eyes. Long black pupils bled vertically within them — and beyond them, I could see nothing, nothing.

I groped behind me for the quill lying on the stool next to my bed. As sharp as it was, it was the closest thing I had to a weapon. I grasped the thing in my fist as if it were a dagger, but before I could do anything with it, a whispery voice drifted in from outside.

“Be calm, my shadow,” the whispery voice said.
“Shh.
Now, do you see him?”

The yellow eyes twitched up and to the side as if listening, not to their questioner but something farther in the distance. Holding my breath, I listened too. Over the sound of my heartbeat throbbing in my ears, over the light trills of humming crickets, I could hear urgent shouting. The yellow eyes listened to them intently, floating bodiless in gray wisps of smoke.

I pushed myself upright on my woolen mattress. “Who are you?” I said in what was supposed to be a whisper.

But the question came out louder than I had meant it, and the yellow eyes snuffed out like two candles. A gust of wind sent a nearby lemon tree into a tumult. Heavy footsteps clanged down the dirt road near my house.

“They’ve found us!” the whispery voice cried from outside. “Quick! Quick! We must go!”

“No, wait!” I exclaimed. I flung my quilt from my legs and lunged for the window. A puff of smoke burst in front of me,
filling my nose and the back of my mouth with the scents of cinnamon and incense. I tried to cough the smoke away, but no use. In an instant the smells overpowered me, made me dizzy. I fell back against my pillow.

“No,” I think I murmured. The sound of birds’ wings beat in my ears. “No. Please. Wait. Come back.”

The last thing I saw as the world darkened was the wild image of a bearded man whispering a sentence in a foreign tongue. In vain my mind grasped at his words. Then I plunged into a restless sleep, unsure if I had ever been awake or not.

By the next morning my memory of the night had faded, as dreams do. I spent most of the day napping in my Uncle Diego’s bookmaking workshop, slumped over the manuscript I was supposed to be ruling for him. Dream or not, my experience with the yellow-eyed demon had exhausted me. Even if it hadn’t, the workshop’s stagnant air — hot from summer and vinegary from curing — could fatigue even the world’s most energetic apprentice.

Of course, I had never been the world’s most energetic apprentice.

“Bali.”

Still dull with sleep, I mumbled some insult and covered my head with my arms.

“Bali. Baltasar. Your ink.”

I opened my eyes just in time to see my inkwell sliding off
the edge of my slanted desk. In a moment of insanity I threw myself sideways to catch it. Mistake. The sound of my stool’s legs scraping against ceramic tiles was the last thing I heard before I, my inkwell, and all my papers went crashing down onto the tiled workshop floor.

My uncle Diego appeared above me, his smiling face outlined by the brown boughs that supported the roof above him. Though his white head was balding and his green eyes hidden by wrinkles and spectacles, he always gave the impression of an overgrown child.

“This is good, Nephew!” My uncle put his hand on my head, supporting most of his arthritic weight on my skull. “If you don’t make it as a bookmaker, you can always become an acrobat.”

Underneath him I rubbed my bashed elbow with the bony base of my hand. “Make sure it doesn’t stain the grout,” my uncle said. He took a damp cloth from his desk and dropped it onto my face.

Frowning, I peeled the rag off my face so I could see how much grout there was for me to clean. It wasn’t pretty. The workshop’s tiles, once white and hand-painted with blue and red floral patterns, were now covered with splotches of sooty ink. Worse yet, the papers I had spent the last week painstakingly ruling by hand now lay crumpled and ink-spattered under my stool.

“What a mess,” my uncle agreed as I bent over to start
cleaning. “You’re worse than Titivillus. You know that, Bali?”

“Titivillus?” I said with a false innocence. In reality, my uncle had told me that story maybe a thousand times — maybe a thousand times that week.

“Titivillus is an imp, Bali. A demon who would sneak into scribes’ workshops and ruin their work when they weren’t looking. And whenever a monk wrote the wrong word in a manuscript, he’d know that Titivillus was to blame!” My uncle put his hand around his chin. “But I may have told you this story before.”

“Maybe.” I smiled. “Once or twice.”

Chuckling, the old man picked up a quill and returned to his slanted desk, where a long piece of parchment waited for him. Hundreds of ornate black letters shimmered, wet, across the page, and a gold-leafed letter T gilded the upper left corner. A wooden contraption used to stretch leather book covers hid most of the table next to him, along with various awls, brushes, and lacquered boxes. This was the future Diego was preparing me for — the aproned future of the bookbinder and scribe. It wasn’t the most exciting future, to be sure, and it all but guaranteed that my old age would be as hunched and nearsighted as my uncle’s. But I supposed crooked hands and boredom were a small price to pay for not having to toil in the fields or on a fishing ship slaving in the river that connected Palos to the sea.

When I was done cleaning up the mess I had made, I said, “Tell me this, then. If the demon Titivillus made me spill my ink, why didn’t
he
have to clean it up?”

My uncle didn’t even glance up from his work. His face was so close to the page he was inking that I could see a white whisker from his nose scraping against the parchment. “That is a good question, Bali. It must be one of the advantages of being a demon.”

I smirked at him. “You ought to tell the demon I saw last night. It’ll be glad to hear it.”

“I hope you’re not talking about your aunt Serena, Nephew.”

“No! It was a hameh, actually. You know: scary yellow eyes, ‘a scream that can drive a man to madness’—”

My head snapped up at the sound of a sudden, splintery
crack.
My uncle had driven his quill right through the page he was working on; part of the tip had snapped off near the end.

The man squeezed the pen harder into his fist, then realized what he was doing and placed it on the table with both hands. “‘Hameh’?” he said in a carefully measured tone. “Where did you ever pick up that word?”

I scratched a spot of ink off my face. “You told me, Uncle. Remember?”

The old man’s hands relaxed noticeably around his quill. “Yes. Yes, of course. So what did this hameh of yours do?”

“Not much.” I got up from my place on the floor and walked to the window to wring out my now-filthy rag. “It was probably just a dream. Except . . . ” I crumpled the rag into a
ball and patted my other hand against it. “Except I could smell spices. Cinnamon, maybe. And I thought I saw someone.” I replaced the damp rag on my uncle’s desk. “Never mind. Forget it.”

My uncle, however, was clearly not going to forget it. In a twitchy, arrhythmic manner, he tapped his broken quill against the side of his desk. Finally he said, “Go inside the house, Baltasar. I think we’re done for today.”

Done? It took my mind a moment to recognize the word. “Done? You mean with work?”

“Yes. That is exactly what I mean.”

My uncle vaulted off his stool like a much younger man, and before I could figure out how to respond, he was pushing me out the workshop door. Now I was outside, overwhelmed by sunlight, and slouching on the clay steps that led down into our garden. A pure blue sky filled most of my sight. My uncle’s gaze arced over it, as if searching for a hameh.

“Go in the house, Baltasar. And don’t leave until I tell you to. And don’t speak a word of this to your aunt. Promise me you won’t speak of this to her.”

There is magic in this story,
I thought I heard him say from somewhere in my memory. “Now you’re asking me to lie to a family member?”

With a hurried sarcasm he answered, “Yes, I know it will be difficult for you. Now please, Bali. Promise. Promise me you won’t tell her.”

“All right, I promise. But —”

“Then have a good afternoon, Bali.”

And the door clicked shut in front of me.

I couldn’t believe it. Go on, leave your work early? Stay inside the house, and don’t tell your Aunt Serena?

But what did he . . . ? Why did he . . . ?

I made a move to reenter the workshop, but as I did I felt something crack beneath my foot. And when I lifted my shoe, I saw that I had stepped on a single black feather, bent in the middle where my foot had snapped it. Its black quills splayed in every direction, caked with some grimy substance I couldn’t name. I knelt and lifted the thing to the sky. White sunlight haloed each fraying quill, and black ooze — maybe ink, maybe tar — sweated from the feather’s surface and out the bottom of its tip.

I rubbed the ink off my fingers, feeling it damp and sticky on my skin. Oh, something strange was going on, all right. Something that linked hamehs and Amir al-Katib and cinnamon that tasted tangy on the back of your tongue when you smelled it.

But what?

Not knowing what to
do about my uncle, I stuffed the feather into the leather pouch hanging from my belt and hopped down the crumbling clay stairs that led into our garden. My aunt Serena knelt there under the blazing summer sun, knee-deep in a bed of parsley and fennel. Her long, graying hair was a nest of sweat and tangles. Rivers of soily sweat snaked down her burly, sunburned arms. Beyond her, a dirt road meandered up a scrub-covered hill, winding its way past more off-white terracotta-roofed houses. Eventually that dirt road would lead into town, around the public fountain where we collected our water every morning, past the town church where I’d be confirmed later this year, and all the way to the alley where my friends loitered each midday break with cheap wine, dirty jokes, and a well-used deck of cards.

The few coins in my pouch called out to them, chattering each time I took a step.
Ignore your uncle, Baltasar,
the coins seemed to say.
Why care about dreams and feathers when there
are more important matters to attend to? Like Tristan’s compulsion to bet on the worst hands possible and Ruy’s inability to bluff!

My coins were right. I wasn’t going to waste such a nice day fretting over my uncle’s lunacy — or imaginary demon-birds, come to think of it. At least, not when there was a card game waiting for me.

So carefully, quietly, I tiptoed around my aunt. “Wherever you’re going,” Serena said as I passed her, “could you at least
try
to be home before dinner?”

“Absolutely!” I said, flashing her my most dashing grin. We both knew I would never keep that promise. I didn’t see a reason to tell her I’d been ordered to stay inside the house. After all, Diego
had
told me to keep quiet.

After giving her a final wave, I headed into downtown Palos, that maze of craggy buildings and narrow cobblestone streets made narrower by the legions of housewives who shuffled through them. Before long I was in the marketplace, surrounded by the stench of fish and red-capped merchants who hollered sales at me from all sides. Tired of the crowds, I darted down a side street. Within minutes I was running through the port. The sun beat harder on me out here where there was no shade from crowded houses to protect me, but my dusky skin had always shrugged off the harmful effects of the sun. According to my uncle, I’d inherited my dark skin from his side, from my long-deceased Mediterranean-Jewish father. It was about the only thing I had left of my Jewish heritage; my family had
converted and had me baptized shortly after I was born.