Hammer of Witches (36 page)

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
I
FRIT
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.

“Why did you do this?” I demanded. “Why did you burn the fortress? You made a deal with Catalina. You said there would be a truce!”

Anacaona tossed her chin upward. “I’ll not deny it. But the truce ended when you returned to our village with your father. We had no choice. Not only did the Spanish kidnap our women, they invaded one of our sacred caves, killing one of the shamans inside.”

“It could have been an accident!”

“It was an act of war. We had no choice but to strike back.”

“You promised you would talk!”

“Talk! What good would talk do? The world doesn’t work that way, Shaman. We have tried to talk before, when others stole our women, attacked our lands. Talk is useless.”

Maybe she was right. I thought of the women the crew had kidnapped, and Arabuko enslaved on the
Niña.
I said, “I agree that what my people did was wrong. But a war won’t help the Taíno. If you had waited, I could have helped you negotiate with Colón. You could have built an alliance based on trade, done something in the self-interests of both our people. And maybe we could have avoided any bloodshed.”

“Be sure, Shaman, we Taíno do not seek out conflict. But we must defend ourselves.” With a bare foot Anacaona prodded one of the dead on the ground next to her, the corpse of my old friend Salcedo, the musician. “People like this do not listen to reason. Your people and mine are too different. The only language they understand is the language of spears and blood.”

Thunder crashed above us, and Anacaona shielded her head with an arm. The crimson band of paint streamed down her cheeks under the rain. “Enough talk. We will return to Maguana. You and your father may stay with us for as long as you desire.”

I fixed my gaze on the charred bodies by her feet. “My thanks,” I murmured. I had nowhere else to go.

The young queen rubbed my wet head and picked up my chin with a finger. “Buck up, little shaman! Tonight we will feast.” Anacaona grabbed a sack of booty from her side and
hoisted it over her shoulder. I watched her as she made her way down the path to the bay across the beach, a sprightly red figure hiking through a maze of black bodies.

“They’ll be back, you know!” I called down to her. “Colón and the others. There will be a war!”

“I hope so!” she called back. “They deserve it.”

I watched Anacaona for another minute until she disappeared into the forest. As it started to rain, I made my way back down to the beach, where Jinni and Catalina were helping my father stand. “I’m fine,” he said to their fussing, and he looked it too. Rotating his shoulder in its socket he said, “I haven’t felt so good in a long time.” He looked over at the genie I had summoned and said, “I will have to remember that trick.”

Catalina and I released the genie and ring from our service. I told my father, “Anacaona invited us to stay with her in Maguana.”

“Then we should go,” he said. “I think I could use some rest.”

“You go. I’m going to stay here for a minute.”

Jinniyah clung to my arm, and my father said, “Very well, Bali. Then I will see all of you in Maguana.”

As angry as I was that he had attacked the fortress, as I watched my father leave the battlefield I felt mostly relieved. At least my father was still alive, because of me. I would have time to argue with him later.

As Amir followed the rest of the Taíno into the forest, I took Jinniyah under a palm tree to protect her from the rain. Catalina joined us and said, “What are we going to do now?”

Before us the high tide crept up over the corpses of those the genie had been unable to save. I said, “We’re going to bury them. All of them.”

And we did. Even using golems to carry the bodies and dig the plots, the burials took most of the evening. As we worked, Anacaona’s words beat on my mind:
It is a sad truth. They do not listen to reason. Your people and mine are too different.

In the forest I added a last pile of dirt to the grave of my friend, Antonio de Cuellar, and wondered if she was right. I wiped my hands and sat with Catalina and Jinni at the edge of the woods. We watched the ocean as the rain began to thin.

Something flat, maybe a leaf, struck the side of my face and lay against my cheek. I took it off. It was a playing card, one of the old cards Antonio and Pérez had played with long, long ago. It was burnt around the edges, almost unreadable. I wiped off the soot and raised the thing in front of me.