God Carlos (6 page)

Carlos stopped and slowly turned to face his antagonist. Inside him, an insurmountable rage was building, but he struggled hard to hide his true feelings.

“Do not let me hear you call me that name, señor,” he said icily. “I do not like it.”

De Morales would not let it go. He snickered. “What will you do to me, God Carlos, strike me dead?”

Words alone were an insufficient answer to such public scorn, and Carlos immediately knew that. He slapped de Morales hard on the left cheek with his open hand, snapping the other's head violently back.

That was also unanswerable with words. De Morales pulled out his dagger, bellowed a roar of anger, and slashed wildly at Carlos.

Carlos drew his own knife, shied out of reach, and waited for his opportunity while the other flailed away, wielding his dagger like a man deranged.

One savage stroke hissed wide, and for a blink de Morales was awkwardly twisted by the momentum of his own mad swing, his side bared open and unprotected.

Seizing de Morales by the shoulder and clasping him close, Carlos lunged like a cobra and drove the knife deep into the side of the other man's chest. The dagger sank into flesh like it was warm pudding. For a brief moment, the two men seemed locked in a deadly mating dance, Carlos gripping the knife with one hand while steadying de Morales to receive the full thrust of the blade with the other.

His eyes bursting open with shock and disbelief, de Morales slumped grudgingly, like a coyly consenting lover, into the arms of his killer, who still clutched the penetrating blade buried down to the hilt.

“Holy Mother of God! I can't breathe!” he gasped. Blood spewed in dark, brocade-rich clumps from his mouth.

Then he fell to the deck, dead.

 

* * *

 

There was an accounting afterward of the events and words that led to this woeful incident, and an informal court of inquiry was convened and presided over by de la Serena to find out what exactly had happened between the two men to have brought matters to such a tragic end. Men on both sides testified, and although Carlos had few supporters, he had provocation and taunting to explain his behavior.

De la Serena pieced together a patchwork version of what had happened and ruled the homicide justified as self-defense. Some of de Morales's friends and shipmates were unhappy with this conclusion, especially since Carlos admitted striking the first blow. But under the circumstances, de la Serena said ruefully, a man could have given no other reply without a severe loss of face. And though some of the men grumbled, in their hearts they knew the captain was right.

After the inquiry, there was a funeral. The body of the dead man was wrapped in a piece of sailcloth and weighted down with a few stone cannonballs taken from the four Lombard cannons mounted in carriages on the deck.

A day after the fight, on a clear and windy morning, a brief funeral service was held aboard the
Santa Inez.
De la Serena read from the 23rd Psalm, all the crew attended, and after the reading, the body was ceremoniously hurled into the sea.

The body struck the calm surface with a startling splash, loud and vulgar like ejected excrement. It rolled and burrowed into the bottomless blue as the ship ghosted away in a light morning breeze. A moment later no eye could tell where it had fallen, the crinkled surface of the ocean being so vast and changeless all around the creeping vessel.

No one knew where de Morales had come from or where his family was, and since he had been unable to write, the dead man had left no identifying documents behind. It was as if he had never lived.

Carlos was branded a murderer by some of his shipmates. Others thought his action justified but excessive. De la Serena announced at the end of the inquiry that his official ruling would be entered into the log and become part of the history of the
Santa Inez
and this voyage.

She had been at sea now for twenty-eight days.

Chapter 7

Aneke?”
Why?

That was what Orocobix, with anguish in his voice, asked the
zemi
propped up against the trunk of a nearby seagrape tree.

His Uncle Brayou was dying alone somewhere in the woods, and Orocobix was pleading to the zemi for mercy. But the zemi was not answering, even though it had answered others in the past.

For example, his mother swore that one evening when her heart was torn with trouble and she begged the zemi for comfort, it had replied with soothing words. No one else had heard them, however, for she was alone at the time. But he believed his mother. And he was disappointed that the zemi would not now talk to him. Surely, being a god, the zemi should understand how deeply he was troubled. But it was being hardhearted and saying nothing.

It was March 29, 1520, a Thursday. But Orocobix, who was an Arawak Indian, knew neither the day nor the year, for he could not write and had no calendar.

However, he knew that it was still the rainy season and the time of the year when the wind sometimes blows fiercely from the north and for several days the sea is torn by huge white waves. He also knew that it was not the season to worry about
huraca'ns
—hurricanes—which during the warm months would sometimes ravage the island with a cataclysmic wind and rain, uprooting enormous trees and changing the shapes of rivers.

He poignantly knew that it was time for his Uncle Brayou, who had grown old and frail, to travel to the land where sky-dwelling gods walked on clouds and where the sky was always blue and everywhere was dancing and feasting.

Yet his Uncle Brayou had a dark fear in his heart about dying. He would not admit it, but Orocobix knew and had asked the zemi to help.

And the zemi did nothing and said nothing.

Orocobix looked out to sea as if for an answer, but saw only the distant reef lined by a glistening lace of shimmering surf. He stared at the sky, which was bright and tinged with a brilliant blue so thick that the very air seemed palpable and crystalline like spring water, and the sky had no answer.

He was standing on the shore of what Columbus had called Santa Gloria Bay, now St. Ann's Bay, on an island the Indians knew variously as Yamaca or Xamaca or Hamaica, but whose name has come down to us as Jamaica.

What the word originally meant no one knows today, although the tourist brochures and guidebooks claim its meaning was “land of wood and water.” Others have guessed that it meant “land of springs.” Still others say it meant “land of cotton.” But whatever the origin of its name, Xamaca was the only island in the Indies that Columbus called “the fairest that eyes have beheld.”

Orocobix was a brown man of twenty-five, well-proportioned, with dark straight hair hanging down the back of his neck. His forehead, thick and sloping like a slab of upraised bone, was the most distinctive feature of his face.

It was a look the Arawaks created by tying boards to the foreheads of their newborns. Why they did this is inexplicable today, but if intended for aesthetics this odd custom had at least the practical effect of making the Arawak forehead so tough that in combat clubs and swords often shattered against it.

Curling out of the sand like the bony claws of a sea monster were the rotting remains of two wrecked caravels,
Capitana
and
Santiago
, which Admiral Columbus had abandoned seventeen years earlier in Santa Gloria Bay on his fourth and last voyage to the Indies when shipworms had made the vessels unseaworthy.

It was in this very spot that the gods from the sky had worked a great miracle, causing a serpent to devour the moon and spit it out again only after the Arawaks had publicly repented for being inhospitable to the marooned foreigners and vowed to do better.

Orocobix did not know it now, and would never know it, but the miracle Columbus had performed for the Arawaks had come not from the Spanish god, but from a German book, the
Ephemerdies
of Regiomontanus, which forecast a total eclipse of the moon on February 29, 1504.

When the Indians would not feed the gluttonous appetite of his marooned crew—one Spaniard ate as much in a day as an Arawak did in a week—Columbus warned the
caciques
of the surrounding tribes that the Spanish god would devour the moon as a warning of the pestilence and famine they would be punished with for mistreating the shipwrecked Spaniards. And then the moon was devoured, just as the god from the sky had predicted, causing widespread panic, consternation, and wailing repentance among the Indians.

All this magic happened when Orocobix was a boy of eight. Even then he was a devout believer in the zemi and slept with it at his side. All his life he had believed with heart and soul.

The zemi, representing the great god Yocahuna, was now resting against the trunk of a seagrape tree, looking inscrutable. It was made of dark wood carved in the image of a bird that had the feet of a man, a prominent beak permanently impregnated with a sidelong painted grin, and two arms jutting from its side like wings except that they were tipped by what looked suspiciously like fingers. In truth, the effigy was hideous, and liking it—to say nothing of idolizing it—took a zealot's devoutness.

On the day that Orocobix stood on the seashore, the Arawaks had already been in Jamaica for an unknown period of time, perhaps hundreds, even thousands of years. Although Orocobix did not know the origins of his people but believed they had always lived in Jamaica, their roots actually extended to the Orinoco River and Delta Amacuro.

The Taíno people to whom the island Arawaks and Orocobix belonged had puddle-jumped their way up the Lesser Antilles over the past centuries, driving ahead of them an even more primitive Stone Age people known as the Siboneys. Using as stepping stones the islands of the archipelago, the Arawaks moved into the Greater Antilles displacing the slow-witted Siboneys from Puerto Rico, Hispaniola, Cuba, and Jamaica. What happened to the people they dislodged, no one knows, and on this day in 1520 when Orocobix stood on the shore, the Siboneys were nearly extinct.

Now the same implacable fate was threatening the Arawak. Already they had been driven from the Lesser Antilles by the fierce Carib Indians, a savage, warlike people who ate their male Arawak captives and bred their females. His village had been struck by these murderous raiders many times and several Arawak children taken to be caponized—their testicles removed—making them soft and fat for the roasting spit. The raiders were wicked
canaballi,
cannibals, and just thinking about them made Orocobix shudder.

 

* * *

 

Orocobix was naked. But he was not self-conscious about his nakedness, for he had never worn clothes. His body was painted with black, white, and red dyes as adornments to advertise his youth and manhood, and his right nostril was pierced with a small delicate ornament made from an alloy of gold and copper the Indians called
guanin.
He did not know it, but the dyes protected his skin against the pitiless sun like a lotion.

He stood on the shore of the land he belonged to and loved deeply as his home and asked his god again, “Aneke?” Why?

Why would the zemi not help Uncle Brayou who lay dying alone in his hammock somewhere in the bush?

If Brayou had been a cacique, his counselors would have sent his soul peacefully to
coyaba
—Arawak heaven—by quietly strangling him one night as he slept.

But Brayou was an ordinary man whose time had come. And in spite of all the desperate pleas of Orocobix, the zemi said nothing and made no move to help.

“Naboria daca,”
Orocobix said humbly. I am your servant. Help me, please.

 

* * *

 

Orocobix gently picked up the zemi and headed toward the sloping grasslands fringing the foothills. He was following a footpath marked out over the years by Arawaks going back and forth between the village at the foot of the mountains and the sea. As Orocobix walked he was careful not to bump the zemi against any overhanging bush, but sheltered his god protectively under one of his arms.

Following the footpath, he entered the woodland and made his way into the dense foliage until he came to a clearing where he found Uncle Brayou dozing on his hammock slung between two jagua trees.

The elders had brought his uncle here following a long-established Arawak custom of taking the dying with their hammocks to a place where they could be left to die alone in dignity. It was what was done when an Indian was old or sick beyond hope. On the ground next to the hammock the elders had thoughtfully left some cassava bread and a gourd of water.

Orocobix, on seeing that his uncle was asleep, tried to sneak away without disturbing him, but the old man opened his eyes and cried, “Orocobix, am I in coyaba?”

Orocobix drew close to the hammock and whispered to his uncle, as Arawaks do in the presence of death, “No, Uncle.”

The old man began shaking, his body raging with a fever. Orocobix touched him gently on the arms and whispered, “I have prayed to the zemi for you. But so far, he has not answered me.”

Uncle Bráyou laughed loudly. “He is wood. You expect an answer from wood? Wood has no tongue to speak.”

“Uncle!” Orocobix scolded, making a shushing motion with his hands. “The zemi will hear your blasphemy and be offended.”

Uncle Brayou sagged into the hammock and laughed so hard that he began coughing. Orocobix stroked him gently on the back.

When he recovered, Uncle Brayou gasped, “Wood has no feelings. Oh, Orocobix, you are such a child.”

“One day, Uncle, you will see that I was right and you were wrong. Then you will appreciate the zemi for its protection.”

Uncle Brayou coughed and spat an ugly chunk of green spittle, which nearly hit the zemi straight on the beak.

It was an old argument that had raged between them since Orocobix was a child. Even on his deathbed, Uncle remained stubborn and would not be moved.

Uncle Brayou was one of the bravest and strongest of his generation. One time when the village was under attack, Uncle Brayou killed three of the raiders by himself, using a spear taken from a Carib warrior. He had the heart of a fighter, but he was also a woeful unbeliever. And even though age and disease had struck him down and he had been taken out into the bush to die, he still would not recant his disbeliefs. The Arawak zemis were not gods but statues made of wood or stone. Yocahuna did not exist. Others may have thought such terrible things, but Uncle Brayou spoke them openly to all who would listen.