Antonio glowered, but didn’t say anything else.
“So that means you weren’t on Roanoke Island just waiting for Andrea’s grandfather to show up,” Jonah said, feeling disappointed.
“No, but”—Brendan shot a glance at Antonio, who was reclining at the front of the canoe—”we were there kind of waiting for white men.”
“What?” Jonah said. In his surprise, he jolted back against John White’s leg. The old man moaned in his sleep. Dare, who was sleeping beside him, opened one eye, seemed to decide that Jonah wasn’t a threat, and went back to snoring.
“White men came to Roanoke Island in the waning months of summer—er, August, I guess—every year for several years,” Brendan said. “Several times they killed Indians and burned their villages nearby. Even when they only visited local tribes, acting like they were friendly, they left behind, um—”
“Do not say, invisible evil spirits!” Antonio commanded. “Or invisible bullets! That’s not what it was!”
“Really, we’re not going to laugh, no matter what,” Katherine said.
Antonio ignored her.
“We were on Roanoke Island as sentries, all right?” Antonio finished for Brendan. “Our tribe sends someone every August. We were watching, so we could alert our tribe if anyone came. They trusted us!”
“But you saved his life,” Jonah said, touching John White’s leg. “Why did you do that if you thought his people were dangerous?”
“It’s our tribe’s code,” Brendan said. “He was alone and in trouble, so we saved him. Just like the tribe saved us.”
“Brendan was a slave when the tribe took him in,” Katherine said in a hushed voice.
“So you were right, thinking that he was a runaway,” Jonah said.
“Oh, no,” Brendan said, and for the first time, he sounded even more bitter and angry than Antonio. “I was just a baby, on a ship carrying slaves. Sir Francis Drake—remember him from Social Studies class? He stopped by Roanoke Island when there were just some English soldiers there, before they sent the colonists. The soldiers were starving—”
“And the Indians were getting sick of them stealing their food—” Antonio interrupted.
“So Sir Francis Drake became the big hero,” Brendan said mockingly. “He dumped out hundreds of slaves to make room to take the soldiers home to England.”
Jonah looked at Katherine.
“Is this something else I missed hearing about in fifth-grade Social Studies?” he asked.
“Wasn’t mentioned,” Katherine said, biting off her words.
“But it’s true!” Brendan said. “Hundreds of slaves, stolen from a Spanish colony, used to being slaves, yes, but also used to being fed—suddenly they’re dumped out on an empty island with no food, no boats to use to get to the mainland. . . . If our tribe hadn’t taken us in, everyone would have died.”
“Your tribe took in hundreds of people?” Jonah asked. He wondered why that wasn’t something he’d studied at school. These people sounded like saints.
“No. A lot of the slaves died before the tribe found them,” Brendan said, “including my parents.”
Now he was glowering every bit as angrily as Antonio. Jonah wanted to say, Look, I’m not related to Sir Francis Drake! I didn’t have anything to do with this!
Except maybe he did. He didn’t have any idea who he was related to or what time period he’d originally lived in.
“Sir Francis Drake didn’t even see the slaves as people,” Brendan said bitterly.
“It’s not just slaves who are treated like that,” Antonio said. “Did Katherine or Andrea tell you my story?” he asked Jonah.
Jonah shook his head.
“I was a cabin boy on a Spanish ship,” Antonio said. “Not such a bad life—there are worse places for orphans to live—as long as you’re good at dodging fists. So then, a couple years ago, the captain decided he might make more money trading with tribes way north of Saint Augustine. Only problem was, none of those tribes spoke Spanish. No one on the ship spoke the Indians’ languages. So—leave a little kid behind, come back a year or two later—you, captain, have got yourself a translator.” Antonio seemed to be straining harder and harder to sound as if he didn’t care. “If the kid’s still alive.”
“You mean, they dropped you off alone?” Jonah asked. “Someplace you didn’t know anyone, where you didn’t even know the language, when you were . . . how old?” He squinted at Antonio. The boy and his tracer were almost exactly the same size, which made the tracer about thirteen too. And Antonio had said before that he’d come to America three years ago. That meant he’d been . . . “Only ten?” Jonah asked.
“Yeah. But, hey, I survived,” Antonio said, and now there was pride in his voice. “Next year, the ship came back and, baby, I hid. I knew a good thing when I had it. I knew where people treated me like a human being.”
The lower half of his body was reaching for his paddle again.
“Back to work,” Antonio said, though he didn’t sound sorry about it. He slid his head back, rejoining his tracer completely. Then he froze.
“Oh, no,” he moaned.
At the back of the canoe, Brendan gasped.
“What?” Jonah asked.
“So that’s why our tracers didn’t want to think about Croatoan Island,” Antonio muttered.
“You know now?” Katherine asked excitedly.
But Antonio didn’t look excited. He—and his tracer—were just sitting there, stunned, staring off into the distance.
“The evil spirits,” Antonio whispered. “The invisible bullets.”
“Germs,” Brendan corrected.
“You’re talking about—what? Bacteria? Some kind of virus?” Jonah asked, looking from one boy to the other. He couldn’t understand why they both looked so horrified. “That doesn’t sound so terrible.”
Then Antonio pointed.
And Jonah saw the skulls.