“Gold,” Pinzón repeated.
A gloaming light in the man’s eyes. Then darkness.
“Pah,” Pinzón spat, then drove the sword into the dead cacique’s neck.
All about us, twisted bodies amongst fallen gourds, the beach strewn with feathers, coloured stone, the bodies of women and men.
Moishe had an arquebus in his hands. When Pinzón had given orders, he, too, had fired.
“Sh’ma Yisroel,” he had muttered. He had prayed. He had expected to die. “A bayzeh shu.”
This was evil.
He felt that surely God would wake and come down to the island for this.
And Moishe expected that He would strike him dead.
After fireworks: smoke and ash. A bitter scent. Pinzón ordered his men over the killing field to pursue the natives who had fled. The bo’sun hoisted Moishe to standing, hauling his arm toward him like a halyard.
“Come. We hunt. And you, our surgeon: there may be a gash or two which needs your tending, a man rent asunder who’ll want his two halves knitted back together.”
And so we joined the slavering pack as they left their guns and strode into the foliage.
The silent woods. Even the songbirds held their breaths. All that was not rooted had fled or disappeared into stillness.
When soldiers march, all destinations hide.
Several natives were compelled to be guides and by the evening, they had led Pinzón’s men into a village. The buildings were quiet, but none more quiet than the Indios, haunched in a scrubby square, staring at us toytshreken terrified. At one end of the square was a large bohío, a sizeable structure of tree trunks and thatch. Inside, hundreds of villagers, close-packed and fearful. They did not dare exchange shelter for unprotecting sky.
The Spanish mariners, only lately pirates and conquerors of land, stood before the village considering the art of plunder.
But few spoils are as enticing as a good nosh when a warrior’s kishkas snake with hunger and so, when a steady-faced young woman rose and gathered a basket of roasted chickens—aleychem ha’shalom, peace be upon them—and walked up to the strangely bearded strangers, they accepted them as tributes.
Each fressed upon this Jeanne d’Arc meat, gnawing on the juicy poulkes with grave enthusiasm.
Alvaro Sanchez, a cousin to Pinzón, was first among the crew to finish. His thick cheeks glistened with grease, chicken pieces like burrs in his greasy beard.
He was an ox-large bruiser with a groys belly, fat as a booty sack.
A body into which the devil entered, for now, his dinner over, a fire enflamed his gaseous soul. He dropped his oily clutch of chicken bones and unsheathed his sword. This was not a spontaneous impulse toward cutlery and the graces of the table, for he howled, a monstrous beast.
As one, the twenty others seized their blades and they began to hack bellies and slice throats like crazed shochets dispatching sheep—men, women, children, and the old alteh Indios, all of whom were seated, unarmed, and caught off guard.
Within the time one could croak a single kaddish, there remained not one villager alive in the square.
The young woman leapt onto the outside wall of the bohío and scrambled up onto the thatched roof. She would leave this earth behind.
In a fever, Pinzón’s men rushed through the door of the bohío and by slash and thrust began to murder all inside. The blood of an entire flock dispatched like floodwater. The girl, banshee-shrieking, emboldened those few villagers who could find their strength, to clamber up the wooden poles of the house. They birthed themselves through the thick thatch and onto the roof. From there they ascended into the trees and escaped into the canopy of leaves.
Moishe had collapsed in the square. Pulled by the tide of unhinged madness, he had drawn his sword.
Blood coloured its blade. He looked for a moment, mute with shock, as if it were a severed leg. His own. Wounded and without feeling.
“An evil spirit afflict my father. An evil spirit afflict my father’s father,” Moishe hissed.
A curse on where he came from. A curse on those who made him.
Then he dropped the sword and ran.
So, tell me, when did you first know you were a pirate?
Chapter Four
Days or weeks or years later. What does it matter? The tide had turned long ago and we were at sea.
“Feh,” I said and glided down to the mainmast.
I’d flown to the sky to sight what was hidden behind the horizon. “Ten four-pounders wait to pestle us into stew,” I announced.
Before long, a galleon loaded with guns and gold rose in the distance. A ship returning to Spain, plotzing with spoils. Our gobs would soon dribble with Pavlovian glee.
We made to haul up from the cove where we’d hove to, ready to broadreach our bowsprit right up the mamzers’ nether hawsehole.
L’chaim, you Spanish ladies!
“And the crew?” Moishe asked me. “How many sailors?”
“Thirty on deck. Several monks and priests …”