Hammer of Witches (16 page)

Being stuck on a ship without being able to use magic soon became mind-numbing, so I decided to spend my days helping Jinniyah and the other servants with their chores. We made stews, checked knots, caught fish off the side of the boat. The
deck was in constant need of sweeping; occasionally we took latitude off the stars. It was a tiring life under the brutal autumn sun, but at least it kept my mind off the Malleus Maleficarum.

And it wasn’t all sunburns and backbreaking labor. Every night at supper, Jinniyah and I would sit with Antonio de Cuellar and his friends, who were quickly becoming our friends too. We’d laugh together over our hardtack and salted cod, listening to Martín Pinzón argue with Colón in the cabin while Diego Salcedo strummed his guitar.

Later at night we’d sing bawdy songs and tell stories from home, trying to forget how much we missed Spain and its women. The snub-nosed Pérez would regale us with tales of his crazy wife, and Bartolome spoke in a hushed tone about the girl he wrote letters to while in prison. I, of course, was not one to waste an opportunity to spin my own yarns: “So there was this flower girl, Dirty Mary, that I used to know back in Palos . . .”

The men listened raptly as I described the girl’s increasingly debauched deeds, and before long they were guffawing and hooting at my descriptions of her. “Oh, I wish I had a girl like her back home,” Antonio said with a far-off look in his eyes. He extended his arm around Jinniyah, and led her around the deck in a kind of two-person jig. “I’d dance with that Dirty Mary until we could barely feel our feet. Then I’d take her home and water her flowers, if you know what I mean!”

Everyone laughed, and Salcedo strummed his guitar louder,
and before long most of the crew had joined in with Antonio’s dance. Even the sailors who were on duty were singing along and clapping their hands like castanets. The only one who wouldn’t join in the fun was Pedro Terreros, but I supposed he was too sophisticated to enjoy such a low-class dance.

Nevertheless I jigged over to Colón’s cabin boy and said, “You don’t have to sit alone all the time, you know. Come join us.” The boy glared at me, scooped up his cat, and strutted away.

Work, prayers, supper, stories. It was the same, day after scorching day. Then finally one night I realized six weeks had passed, and we’d arrive in the Orient any day now. I found a place on the deck next to the already-snoozing Jinniyah and watched the clouds slide through the misty night above us. For the first time in a month and a half, I felt safe. Soon my new friends and I would arrive in the Indies, and the Malleus spy still hadn’t materialized. Colón, I decided, had been mistaken all along. I pulled my hat over my face and nestled back against the ship’s rail, ready to get a good night’s sleep.

“Looks like a bird to me.”

“Probably just a seagull.”

“Seagull? A harpy, more like.”

I pushed my hat back on my head and opened my eyes. A group of my crew-mates had gathered not far from me, their necks craned up so they could watch the midnight sky.

“I’ll get Colón,” Antonio’s friend Pérez said. “He’ll want to
write it down in that damn log of his.”

“Forget Colón. Get Sanchez.” Salcedo brushed his fingers lightly across his guitar strings. “He’ll tell you how much it costs and report it back to the queen.”

As the sailors around him dissolved into laughter, I shielded my eyes and looked up at the sky. But I could see nothing up there — no bird, no harpy. Just clouds and darkness and a hidden moon.

Suddenly an awful scream pierced the night. That scream. I bolted to my feet.

The floor rumbled under my shoes as dozens of sailors stampeded across the deck, shouting.

“What was that noise?”

“I told you, it’s a seagull!”

“A seagull! What kind of seagull sounds like that?”

Juan de la Cosa barged down the stairs of the aftcastle. “What in heaven’s name is going on here? Why aren’t you at your stations?”

Rodrigo Sanchez came up beside him, holding his knobby arms. “We saw something. In the sky. Some of the crew’s saying it’s a demon.” Rodrigo’s voice sounded thin and warbly, his laughter loud and brittle. “To tell you the truth, another scream like that and I might start to agree with them!”

Behind him Pedro Terreros hmphed, and Colón pursed his mouth with the same scorn. “Superstition on top of superstition,” the admiral muttered. “No demons will come near these
ships. This journey has been blessed by God Himself.”

Another tattered shriek ripped across the sky, and I felt Jinniyah’s fingernails digging into my forearm. “Bal, did you hear that? It’s a . . . it’s a . . .”

She couldn’t say it, but I knew. I knew that cry. It was the same one I heard in my bedroom that night. Two yellow eyes in my window. The smell of incense and cinnamon.

“Uncle,” I said. “You said you would tell me a true story. You said you would tell me about Amir al-Katib.
”

“I did, Baltasar.
”

Antonio de Cuellar barreled down the forecastle stairs and swung his tree trunk of an arm upward. “There she is!”

And there she was. The hameh: a ragged black hawk with a scimitar of a beak and piercing gold eyes surrounded by smoke. It loosed its horrendous shriek — the sound of women murdered in their beds or spirits clawing in vain as the earth swallowed them. It threw open its wings. Though the night was clear, its feathers were slick and shining, even from a distance.

My insides shook, and a jerky laugh escaped my mouth. “It’s blood,” I said, realizing.

A dozen heads snapped to look at me. Jinniyah tugged on my arm. “Luis, don’t talk like that. It scares me.”

I stared down at my fingers. Once they were stained black from a feather found on the steps of my uncle’s workshop. At the time I’d thought it was ink on the feather. But it wasn’t.

It was blood. Black blood.

“Look out!”

The full force of Jinniyah’s slight body smashed into my side, and it was moments before I realized we were both on the floor.

“Sorry,” Jinniyah said under her breath. Blood dribbled through her tunic where the hameh had buried its claws.

I opened my eyes wide. “Jinni!” I said, in my panic forgetting to call her by her false name.

“Bal, above you!” she cried.

I only had a fraction of a second to look with horror at the eyes of the hameh. Smoldering with some unknown fire, they aimed at me with unwavering hatred. That look told me everything. The hameh wasn’t here for just anyone. It wasn’t here for the crew. No.

It was here for me.

The bird sliced through the sky, lunging at its prey. I dived sideways and threw my arms across my face.

“Luis!”

A bone-crunching noise sounded over the din.

“Get away from him, you bastard!”

Loosing a muted squawk, the hameh reared up and shook its head against the blow. Behind it Antonio de Cuellar clenched his teeth as he finished the follow-through of his carpenter’s hammer, now damp with black blood. “Go back where you came from, demon!”

The hameh flapped higher, crowing in defiance. Then the bird stopped in its place and cocked its head toward the southwest as if hearing a voiceless call. It reeled around and raced off into the western horizon, dripping a trail of bloody feathers behind it. Rodrigo Sanchez ran out of the admiral’s cabin, Colón’s arquebus in hand. He aimed the gun at the demon and fired — too little, too late.

“Are you all right, Luis?” Antonio asked me. I barely heard the question. I was staring down at the puddle right in front of me. Hameh. Cinnamon. Blood. Black blood.

A whimper broke me out of my stupor. Then I remembered. “Jinni!”

I rushed up to the ruined heap that was Jinniyah. Quickly I fumbled at her belt and servant’s tunic toward the wounds those deadly talons had inflicted.

“No no no. Jinni. Come on. You can’t leave me now.”

From her place on the floor, Jinniyah gave me a sad smile. “Silly boy. Don’t cry.” She cringed to a seated position and motioned at her bloody side. “Look. I’m not even hurt.”

I could hardly bring myself to look at her. But she was right. Under her tunic, under the drying black blood, Jinniyah’s brown skin was as smooth and whole as ever.

Murmurs were beginning to buzz around me — angry, frightened murmurs. I looked around and found myself surrounded by the men of the
Santa María.
Colón and Juan de la Cosa broke into the circle. “It’s over,” the master-at-arms said. “Now get some sleep. We’ve had enough excitement for one day.”

“Sleep!” Bartolome exclaimed in his Portuguese accent. “How are we supposed to sleep when there’s demons —”

Colón cut him off before he could finish. “That was no demon. It is a type of Oriental bird described in Marco Polo’s writings of the Indies. It is called a black heron or somesuch. It is a good sign. It is a sign of land.”

“Bullshit!” I heard Salcedo whisper.

Colón continued, “And if I hear the word ‘demon’ again, whoever says it will spend the remainder of the journey locked down in the hold. Do you understand?”

As the crowd broke out into new arguments, I noticed the
Pinta
and
Niña
sidling up beside the
Santa María.
Vicente probably wanted to see what the fuss was about, but I knew Martín would use the opportunity to pick another fight with Colón. Now was my chance to get away before anyone noticed, so I hooked my arm around Jinniyah’s and brought her down into the hold.

It was pitch black down here, so Jinniyah briefly changed into her genie form so we could see each other under the eerie light of her fiery hair.

“Are you all right?” was the first thing I asked her.

“I’m fine,” she said. “I told you.”

I pushed one hand against the side of my forehead. “You scared the hell out of me.”

“I know. I’m sorry. But I told you genies are hard to kill. What was it he used to call me back then? ‘Durable,’ I think.”

“Who?” I asked her, but the answer announced itself the moment I spoke the word.

Embarrassed, Jinniyah avoided my eyes. “Well, Amir, obviously.”

We stood there a while without speaking. “That was his hameh, wasn’t it? Amir’s.”

Jinniyah sat on a nearby crate and brought her knees up to her chin. “I think so.”

My vision caught on my forearm. Under the black light of Jinniyah’s fire, I could see maroon dots beading around three scratches the hameh had left above my wrist. My eyes locked on them, unable to look away.

I lifted my arm so Jinniyah could see the wound. “All right, Jinni,” I said, very carefully. “Why does my father . . . why does Amir al-Katib want me dead?”

When a person first
discovers that his father is trying to kill him, he will be overcome by a variety of emotions. First comes surprise — that one’s only natural — which defers to anger, confusion, and fear.

But that night when I climbed up the ladder that led out of the
Santa Marías
hold, I found myself overtaken by a different emotion: vindication. This whole time I had been right about my father, while Jinni, Diego, and the Baba Yaga were dead wrong. If I was the hero of this story, Amir al-Katib was clearly the villain. I had known it in my gut from the first time I held his necklace.

As for what I was going to do when I confronted this villain . . . well, I hadn’t made a decision about that yet.

Rodrigo Sanchez awaited me as I climbed out of the hold. Under the moonlight his face was pasty, and his neck seemed very long.

“The admiral wants to talk to you.” Rodrigo’s Adam’s apple
bobbled in his neck. “He seems angry? I could be wrong.”

Something told me he wasn’t wrong about this. But Colón’s anger was about the least of my worries, so I crossed the deck and entered the admiral’s cabin. Colón’s back faced me as he stood behind his desk staring out the porthole that pointed home.

“Tell me, Interpreter,” Colón said into that porthole. “Have you ever heard the story of Job?”

“Yes, sir.”

“Then tell it to me.”

Although I didn’t quite grasp the point of this exercise, I did as he ordered. “It’s about Job, a Jew. He was the most righteous man in the world. God pointed him out to Lucifer and said, ‘Here is a pious man even you cannot corrupt.’ Satan replied that it was easy for Job to be pious. He was rich, had a family, many friends. Without those things, the Devil argued, Job would never stay faithful.”

I stopped there, not knowing if I should continue. “Go on,” Colón said in a cold monotone.

Looking away from him I continued, “God took Satan’s bet. He tested Job. He took everything from him: killed his family, destroyed his home. After a while, Job’s friends left him. They thought he was cursed.” The faces of my dying aunt and uncle passed quickly before me then. In my mind I saw their blood seeping onto my bedroom floor. In a quieter voice I added, “They were right. He
was
cursed.”

“Go on, Storyteller,” the admiral said with some malice. “What happened to Job? Did he keep his faith? Did he remain loyal when troubles fell upon him?”

I didn’t answer. All I could think of was how disloyal I had been, how I’d practiced magic on this ship against the admiral’s orders.