Hammer of Witches (22 page)

But when the Tamo noticed me and Catalina, all work abruptly stopped.

“Uh, hello,” I said to the villagers in their language as we passed, but children gasped and hid behind one another when they saw Catalina’s sword. “Put that thing away,” I scolded her, and she released Excalibur from her service to the amazement of the crowd.

We continued walking through the village, admiring the workmanship of its massive houses. The thatch was thick, fresh, and well-woven, although it appeared this climate didn’t require people to stay indoors to avoid cold weather.

Arabuko emerged from one of those houses with a shorter, paunchier young man. “Ah, there they are,” the second man said. “I am Guacanagarí, cacique of Marién.”

Cacique
must have meant “chief” or “king,” because Guacanagarí was ornamented like royalty. His ears enjoyed far
more feathers than Arabuko’s, and beaded red bands surrounded his waist and high forehead. A crude gold hoop formed a bridge between the man’s wide nostrils, and a necklace made of pearly sea snail shells lay across his collarbone.

“So these are the young shamans,” Guacanagarí said of me and Catalina. So the whole village could hear him, he announced, “In the name of the spirits I welcome you. Welcome to Marién!”

With a clap of his hands Guacanagarí ordered a feast prepared in our honor, and his subjects flitted around the courtyard to ready our meal. “I will show you our village,” the cacique said. Arabuko seemed to have vanished.

We spent the rest of the morning touring Marién with its leader. We learned that the hilly area we had passed through earlier was a farm, and the stones with the squatting women showed images of one of the Taíno gods. The other end of the village was bounded by a muddy river, where people gathered to clean themselves with long leaves that looked like basil. We asked the bathers if they’d seen any large ships in the bay north of the village. None of them had.

Next, Guacanagarí led us into one of the village’s cone-roofed houses. A tree trunk supported the thatched roof from the middle of the building, and the tightly-packed thatch gave us some much-needed shade. Around the circumference of the room hung human-sized slings of netted twine. What their
purpose was I couldn’t yet say.

Catalina directed her attention to the rafters, toward a spot near the main supporting log. There, a bundle of brown bones hung from the ceiling. From down here I couldn’t tell for sure, but if I had to guess I would say the bones were human. As we passed under them, Catalina muttered, “Not very civilized, are they?”

I didn’t know how to answer. Through the ever-open door I could see the village’s main courtyard, where Tamo children yawped and cavorted with two yellow mastiffs and a big brown ball that made funny bouncing sounds whenever they hit it. I wouldn’t call their game
civilized,
not exactly, but the children looked like they were having fun. And the Taíno had welcomed us peacefully enough.

I walked to the edge of the room and pushed one of the braided nets hanging from the ceiling. It sent a shadow dotted with spots of light swinging across the packed-earth floor of the room. “Well-made
hamaca,
no?” Guacanagarí asked me. “Our craftsmen are the best in Ayití.”

“What are they for?” I asked in the Tamo language.

“Why, sleeping, of course! Please, try, try. You’ll like it.”

I made an attempt to climb into the hammock, a goal I wasn’t able to achieve until Guacanagarí held it steady for me. After I found my balance I lay back and let the fibers of the net cocoon me. I closed my eyes and felt myself swing back and forth above the floor.

“It’s pretty comfortable,” I told Catalina as I sat up in the hammock. “Hey, we should use these to sleep the next time we’re on the ships!”

A dreamy look passed over Catalina’s face as I said that. “Then we wouldn’t have to sleep on the floor.”

“Whoever invented these things is a genius,” I told Guacanagarí as I dismounted the miraculous invention. It was funny how even a simple net had a different meaning on the other side of the world.

The cacique said, “You will stay here. The spirits have ordained it. Arabuko and his cousins have offered their home to you. Any
hamaca
you’d like is yours. We are honored to have you as our guests in our village for as long as you need to stay.”

For some reason the offer made me think of Jinni. I couldn’t stay here, not as long as she was alone with a bunch of mutinous sailors in the middle of the ocean.

Catalina seemed to have had a similar thought. “We are grateful, Cacique,” she said in Taíno, “but we cannot linger here. We need to find Grand Khan —”

“And our friends!” I added.

“Do not fret, young shaman,” Guacanagarí said. “Our canoes are the fastest in Ayití. We will find your people’s boats before long. Until then you will stay here with us. Yes? Yes.”

The matter apparently decided, the cacique clapped his hands together and exited the house. Catalina muttered in Castilian, “Generous people, aren’t they?”

“You don’t trust them.” I smirked at her. “You don’t trust anyone.”

“You heard the way Guacanagarí spoke to us. It’s almost as if he doesn’t want us to leave this place.”

I did get that feeling, myself. Catalina went on, “They want something from us. Why else would they be so welcoming of complete strangers — strangers with such an unbelievable story?”

“Maybe they’re just good people,” I suggested. “Besides, I think we should stay here until Guacanagarí’s men find Colón and the others. There’s food, fresh water. And it’s not like we have anywhere else to go.”

“I suppose you’re right,” Catalina admitted, and I took my leave of her so I could locate Arabuko. Before I made it more than ten steps out of the house, Catalina called out, “Infante.”

Behind me, Catalina crouched in the dirt, holding a long black feather between her thumb and forefinger.

A hameh feather. Catalina looked up at the sky. “These Tamo know more than they let on.”

That evening we feasted,
served by men and women carrying wooden bowls and trays filled with about a hundred kinds of food. For the occasion Guacanagarí donned a cape decorated with multicolored feathers. Seven bare-breasted women between the ages of twelve and twenty trailed after him, all with the same black bangs as their male counterpart.

“These are my wives,” Guacanagarí explained.

I tried to avoid looking at them too closely. “All of them?”

“Do not blush, young shaman! Custom on Ayití allows caciques to take as many wives as they desire. Now eat. This feast is in your honor.”

The whole town gathered in a large circle in the courtyard. Catalina and I sat in the place of honor by Guacanagarí, ready to taste the many dishes his people had prepared for us. Arabuko was sitting too far away to include him in our conversation, and besides, we were too hungry to investigate the hameh feather right then. First we had some roasted, well-spiced meat
of an animal the cacique called
manatí.
Then we used circular pieces of flat, starchy bread to pick fish out of a saucy, spicy pot. Over the course of the meal we tasted strange nuts and vegetables with names like
yuca, maís,
and
maní.
I didn’t need the power of translation to know what to call these foods. What they were called was delicious.

When the meal was done, Guacanagarí wiped his fingers with some green herbs and chewed on a stack of dried black leaves called
cohiba.
“I am so pleased to have you in our village,” he told me. “Is there anything else I can do to be of service?”

“Actually . . .” I pulled out the hameh feather Catalina had found. “Can you tell me what you know about this?”

The chief coughed, spitting up black saliva. He wiped it off his chin and cleared his throat. “Seems to belong to some kind of crow. Please excuse me. One of my wives is calling me.”

He hurried off, and Catalina and I went to look for Arabuko, hoping the shaman might be more amenable to answering questions. He was busy at the far end of the courtyard, surrounded by a dozen boys, waving his arms as he told a story.

“And so the great Yaya killed his son Yayael, though he loved his son more than anything in the world. And he kept his son’s bones in a gourd that he hung from the rafters of his house, and over time the bones turned into fish. One day the Four Twins came and climbed on one another’s shoulders so they could steal and eat the fish. Then they heard Yaya returning home, and they fell along with the gourd. When the gourd
hit the earth it smashed into a million pieces, and many waters flowed out of it, creating the great ocean.”

The cross-legged children had clearly heard the story before. They squirmed in their seats, impatient for what would come next. Arabuko sighed, “Yes, all right, you may pick up your
cemíes.
But be careful with them. They are sacred.”

Ignoring him, the boys attacked the pile of stone figurines in front of them, arguing over who got the best one. I couldn’t tell the difference between one and another; each figurine was shaped like a round-eyed man with a painted red nose and a squiggly smile.

When the boys finally settled down, Arabuko said, “Let’s see who can get the Four Twins to visit us.” All at once the children went silent, closed their eyes, and pressed the figurines hard against their foreheads.

As the boys concentrated on their task, Arabuko came up to Catalina and me and spoke to us in Castilian. “So? What did you think of my story?”

Not knowing what to say, I looked at Catalina. She said, “It was . . . very nice. Quite fascinating.”

“I apologize for ignoring you earlier,” Arabuko said, “but I had promised the boys I would give them a lesson today. Whenever I have a chance, I try to teach the children to call upon the spirits so one day I can train one of them to take my place as High Shaman. We haven’t had any success yet, but let’s wait and see. You can try, too, if you’d like.”

Never one to pass up a chance for Storytelling, I decided to take him up on his offer. But no matter how hard I tried, I couldn’t understand the story: why Yaya had killed his child, why he’d kept the bones in his house, or why the bones turned into the ocean.

“Don’t bother,” Catalina muttered so Arabuko couldn’t hear. “That story is unsummonable. It makes absolutely no sense.”

Just as she finished speaking, the air in front of us began to shimmer, and a strange figure danced into view. Tall as a man, it was actually comprised of four gnomish creatures standing on top of one another’s shoulders. The four gnomes had the same round eyes and wormy smiles as the stone figurines the children pressed against their foreheads.

The Four Twins from Arabuko’s story. One of the boys had summoned them.

“Unsummonable, you say?” I teased Catalina, and she hmphed as the tower of gnomes began to teeter. For a second it looked like they would fall, but the top three tumbled in the air and landed lightly on the balls of their feet. The bottom twin turned a somersault and offered a squiggly smile to Catalina.

“Well done, Carabi!” Arabuko said, kneeling down beside the boy who had summoned the Four Twins. “Now we’ll say good-bye and let them go home.” Carabi released the Four Twins from his service. The gnomes hopped back on one
another’s shoulders and faded from view.

That done, Arabuko brought a hand to his chin. “What else? Ah, maybe our new friends from the east can help us learn some new spells! They are shamans too, you know.” The boys in the circle looked up at me and Catalina. “Baltasar, Catalina Terreros, why don’t you tell us a story from the East?”

Catalina and I blushed as we realized all eyes were on us. I stammered, “W-well, this morning Catalina was trying to teach me to summon a unicorn.”

Catalina cleared her throat awkwardly before explaining the story to the crowd. “Yes. Well, a unicorn is a beautiful white horse with a horn of ivory swirling from its head. It lives in the forests, hiding, so it is very rarely seen. Fair young maidens are the only people the unicorn will approach and the only people allowed to ride one.”

As I prepared myself to summon the unicorn and show Catalina what I could do, the Taíno boys stared dumbly at us, brows furrowed and jaws agape. Even Arabuko appeared baffled.

“I think you will have to explain the story again,” he told Catalina.

And Carabi said, “I don’t understand, Arabuko. What’s a horse?”

I’m not sure how long Catalina and I stayed in the village; the Taíno had a different sense of time than I was used to. They did have a calendar — based on the movements of the moon
and the solstices, Arabuko told me — but they didn’t measure out their days with canonical hours, and they’d never heard of the term “week.” After four days I simply stopped counting the days and eased into my new life in Marién. In the mornings I would help Arabuko with his chores, harvesting vegetables from the village garden, catching fish and small birds, or gathering fruits from the forest. We gave these foods to the women of the village, who cooked them in hotpots between their weaving and stone carving. The work was hard, but not as hard as it would have been in Spain. The land here was fertile and gave up its bounty easily. Catalina was right. This land
was
a paradise, and I found myself at peace despite my worries about Jinniyah and Amir al-Katib. I kept meaning to ask Arabuko about the hameh feather, but it never seemed the right time. I felt safe for the first time in weeks, and I allowed myself to relax just a little.