Hammer of Witches (6 page)

I opened my eyes.

A series of fiery letters in an unknown language flared before me. Though I had never seen those symbols before, the word
ameth
escaped my lips, and I knew they stood for truth. Several inches tall, the letters browned the atmosphere around them as if the world were nothing more than paper that could burn away to nothing. Around the edges of the symbols rebellious flames fluttered about, moths with fraying wings of charring paper.

The priest’s head twitched sideways so he could watch the flames. “It is as we had feared. A lukmani.” He choked out the word with palpable disgust. “No matter. Your sorcery won’t save you today, boy!” He seized the cloaked man’s torch and
swung it down to meet me.

But the room lurched, and his hand swept past its target. As the priest hit the ground the torch flew from his grasp and clattered, extinguished, across the floor. The room lurched again. The soldier and cloaked man grasped one of the stone coffins. I clung to the arms of my chair and waited for it all to end.

With a thunderous crash the entrance to the basement exploded. Dust and rubble filled my mouth, my lungs. My vision blurred — I felt weak. Beyond the dust I could make out the outline of a ten-foot-tall earthen beast. Its coal eyes blazed red as it barged through the exploded doorway. With a howl it shoved away the cloaked man and the soldier as if they were nothing more than toys.

The priest’s face flashed red as he scrambled to his feet. “Don’t think you’ve won, lukmani!” he screamed. “The Malleus Maleficarum doesn’t sleep! We will find you, lukmani! We will find you!”

In answer the rocky monster let loose another primal roar. Lifting both arms above his head it ran at my interrogator. But I didn’t get to see any more — the beast’s last monstrous step sent another tremor surging through the ground. My chair and I crashed and tumbled past the stone coffins. Then pain smashed into my shoulders, my knees, and my head as they collided with the floor. I lay sideways, trying to hang onto consciousness, but my last bits of energy drained out of me with every breath.

It was then that I realized this might be the last thing I ever thought. But my last thought wasn’t about the pain or my family or even Amir al-Katib. No, my last thought was a plain and simple one, full of a plain and simple wonder.

I don’t know how I did it, but somehow, I’ve created a golem.

I dreamed the golem heaved
me onto his shoulder and bounded from hill to hill over the Spanish countryside. Or maybe that’s what really happened — I’m not sure. The next thing I remember was my uncle’s voice: “Say you release him, Baltasar. Quickly.”

“I release him,” I think I mumbled.

When next I awoke it was around dawn, and I was stunned to find myself in my own bed. My uncle was sitting next to me, poring over my bruises with an expression of dire worry etched into his face. “I’m sorry to wake you again, Bali. But they will be here soon. Can you sit?”

This man who looked like my uncle but spoke with such heartache was unknown to me, but I did as he asked. Were those tears in his eyes? No. No, they couldn’t be.

“So a golem, Baltasar? And here I thought you’d had enough of my ‘boring old stories.’”

Oh, right. That. “Uncle, I am so sorry. I was such an ass. I just —”

My uncle put up a hand. “As much as I appreciate your groveling, there isn’t time. And I expect you’ll have plenty of questions to ask about this.”

To my surprise my uncle raised the priest’s parchment, the one with all of those dreadful questions in it. The document crackled as my uncle flattened it against my covers, revealing hundreds of lines of script flowing crisply across its surface.

“Where did you . . . ?”

“The golem brought it along when he dropped you here. Quite a smart one you made there. I’d always thought they were all fools with heads full of clay and dirt, but life would be no fun if nothing could surprise you.”

I swear I almost leaped through the ceiling. “You mean you
knew
that golems were real?”

Twining his fingers together my uncle said, “‘Real’ is a relative term, Baltasar. Quite the tricky word you have there.”

I opened my mouth and shut it again. “You’re mad.”

“That’s another relative term, Nephew.”

My gaze trailed across the parchment lying in front of me.
Amir al-Katib . . . last known sighting near Alhambra Palace, Granada . . . known accomplices currently operating under the aliases Diego and Serena Infante. . .

“‘Relative’?” I said, breathing heavily. “All right: let’s talk about that word, ‘relative.’ Question three: ‘What are the names of your closest relatives?’ Sounds like an easy question, doesn’t it, Uncle?”

“Baltasar.”

“That’s what I thought, but it’s not so easy, is it,
Uncle?
‘Who are your closest relatives?’ I said, ‘Diego and Serena Infante.’ Or was I wrong about those names?”

“Bali.”

“So I have a question of my own, Diego! Question one:
Who the hell are you
?!”

By this point the room was cartwheeling around me, so I sank back, drained, against my pillow. With calm hands Diego brought my quilt over my torso.

“Bali, there’s a story about this. And believe me, this is one you’re going to want to pay attention to. All right?”

I took a breath and smelled the remains of Serena’s stew in the kitchen, the vinegar on Diego’s hands. Those were real, still. I was real. So I nodded at my uncle, and he began his story.

“A long time ago — well, not
that
long ago — I lived in Constantinople, in the East. Back then the city was much like Palos once was. It was a Christian city, but many Jewish families lived there too. Even some Muslims lived there — or Moors, as you call them. Not everyone got along all the time, certainly, but it was a good place to grow up, and full of history.

“Then when I was about your age a group of Moors known as the Ottomans laid siege to my homeland. The siege lasted for nearly two months, a terrible time. No food was allowed in from the countryside. Many people died of disease and starvation, including most of my family.

“At the end of May, the Ottomans began their final assault. Our armies were small, and though I was just a boy, I was sent to the front lines. The Pope had sent aid in the form of soldiers from across Europe, but it was not enough to defeat the Ottomans. The city fell to the Moors. I was left without a family, without a home. With nothing.”

I considered the story. It was the same one my uncle used to tell me when I was a child. But back then it had been a tale of adventure and excitement, of swashbuckling heroes and daring escapes. “This story was different when you used to tell it,” I murmured.

“Yes, I admit I may have . . . embellished things slightly. But one part about those old stories was true. During the war I met a young man not much older than myself, a foreigner who had answered the Vatican’s call to protect Constantinople. And although he, like the Ottomans, was born and raised a Muslim, to him the conflict wasn’t about religion. It was about what was right and what was wrong.”

I remembered the story. “You’re talking about Amir al-Katib. He saved your life.”

“And gave me a new one. When the war was over, he said, ‘You will come with me to Castile, my brother, to my home in Palos de la Frontera.’ I didn’t have any reason not to, so I did. It didn’t take long for me to make a new life here. I began speaking Castilian, and I apprenticed myself with a bookmaker. Before long I met your aunt and we married. The two of us were very happy.

“The same couldn’t be said for al-Katib. The man was a traveler. The people of Castile sometimes call the Moors the
mudejares,
‘the ones who stayed.’ But it was against Amir’s nature to stay in one place for long. He would disappear from Palos for years at a time, only to return like a lost dog. Your Aunt Serena had a solution to the problem. ‘You need to get married!’ she’d say. She’d actually grab the books from his hands and throw them out the window. ‘You’re not going to find a wife in there!’ You know your aunt has never been scared of anyone, warrior or not.

“Just when we were beginning to think it was hopeless, al-Katib met a woman. It was amazing to see this warrior’s heart slain by such a creature. They were fiercely in love, but it had to be secret, as were many loves at the time, for she was Christian and he a Moor. They soon had a child, and I have never seen a man — and a warrior, no less — dote so on an infant. But it was a child of his old age, so I supposed I could not fault him.

“Back then many secret marriages were performed, and few were persecuted for such loves. But that was before the Inquisition, and before the Malleus Maleficarum.” Uncle Diego took a deep breath and shook his head. “Al-Katib and his wife were among the first to be captured.”

There was that term again, that “Malleus Maleficarum.” But something about what Diego said bothered me even more. “That doesn’t make sense, Uncle. Al-Katib couldn’t have been
captured. He was seen at Granada last year.”

“I said ‘captured,’ not ‘killed,’ Baltasar. And he was not killed, though sadly his wife was.” Diego paused and said, “Do you remember that story I told you when you were a boy? The one about the hameh and three Arabian brothers? Al-Katib told me that story the day I met him in Constantinople. He said it was a story about men from his family who lived centuries ago, and it was passed down to him through a thousand generations. Al-Katib told me the story was about the evils of revenge, about how hatred can turn you into a monster. But the night the Inquisition killed his wife, he showed up at our door with blood splattered over his clothes and a black bird with yellow eyes sitting on his shoulder. And that night, Amir wore a look so desperate and hateful that I feared he had turned into a hameh himself.

“He said to me, ‘I must go, old friend. I don’t know when I will return here again.’ He thrust something into my arms and said, ‘I leave this in your care, my brother.’ Before I could ask him what had happened or where he was going, he dashed off like a madman.” My uncle’s meaningful stare pierced right through me. “Dashed off, leaving a child in my arms.”

By that time in my life, I’d heard enough fairy tales to know what a sentence like that meant. Until then, though, I’d never known what it felt like to be part of such a story. The end of my uncle’s tale was so obvious, so inevitable, and yet I could hardly believe the words. I said — or maybe I didn’t, I don’t know —“Amir al-Katib is my
father
?”

My uncle clasped his hands firmly on his lap. “Yes, Baltasar. You are his son.”

I couldn’t believe it. My gaze scrolled across the priest’s parchment once more.
Amir al-Katib . . . last seen in Palos, Spain at the home of Baltasar Infante . . . believed to be his only living relation . . .

“But you told me my parents were Abram and Marina Infante!”

“Your mother
was
named Marina,” Diego explained. “And as for ‘Abram,’ well, that was my idea of a joke. After Serena and I married, she invited Amir over for Shabbat dinner every Friday night. He joined us so many times that after a while we started to call him ‘the honorary Jew.’ And your father would laugh and say, ‘Yes, call me Abram.’”

As Diego chuckled at the memory, I lowered my head into my hands. “None of this makes any sense, Uncle.”

“Why not?”

Why not? I opened my mouth a few times trying to sputter out an answer. Why not? “For one thing, he’s a Moor!”

My uncle removed the spectacles from his nose and cleaned the lenses with the bottom of his gown. “Yes. He is a Moor. And so are you. That is something you will have to make peace with for yourself, in time.

“But there is more you do not know. When your father left you that night, he left to wage war on Spain, on all of Christendom. And though I do not agree with his decision, I understand it. Al-Katib had spent his whole life fighting for the
safety of Europe, and now Europe was coming after him and his family. They took his wife from him, his dearest love. And I knew they’d be after us next. We would have to hide, all of us.

“Your aunt and I were Jews back then. And we still are, though we’d never say so aloud. Your aunt and I were known as David and Sara Mizrahi once, but to avoid the Inquisition and Malleus Maleficarum, we became Catholics and were baptized under new names. Diego and Serena because they are sturdy Spanish names, and Infante because with new names and new lives we were like infants again.”

I said, “You keep bringing up this ‘Malleus Maleficarum.’”

“A renegade offshoot of the Inquisition founded in Germany. Both the Inquisition and Malleus Maleficarum were charged with protecting the purity of Christian Europe, but they do so from different angles and with different tools. The Inquisition, as you know, is tasked with rooting out secret practitioners of Judaism and Islam. And as for the Malleus Maleficarum. . . . Well, you know your Latin.”

I ran a finger across the crumbling scarlet wax that had once sealed shut the priest’s parchment. The wax had been marked with a hammer. “Malleus Maleficarum — the Hammer of Witches,” I translated. “So the Malleus Maleficarum’s job is to find witches and kill them?”