Hammer of Witches by Shana Mlawski

Author:Shana Mlawski
Language: eng
Format: mobi, epub
ISBN: 9781600609886
Publisher: Lee & Low Books
Published: 2013-02-26T00:03:00+00:00

I awoke the next morning sweaty and in pain. Catalina had decided to rouse me by kicking my lower back. “Rise and shine, Infante! The sun’s been up for hours.”

“Watch it,” I murmured, opening my eyes. Bits of sand had attached themselves to my eyelashes in the night; I found I could barely see. “What’s the hurry?”

“The hurry is I don’t want to live on this beach forever. I’m going to see if I can find the Santa María and the other ships, or perhaps some sign of civilization. You may stay here if you want; that’s your prerogative. But I am leaving.”

Catalina pulled on her boots and started hiking down the shore. I peeled my face off the ground, spit chunks of sand off my tongue, and slapped more sand out of my hair. “Wait!” I called after Catalina. “I thought you were going to teach me Storytelling!”

I stuck my shoes under one arm, quickly rinsed my sandy hair out in the ocean, and ran down the shore in the direction of the October sun. Catalina was currently standing on a sand dune, thumb locked into one of her belt loops as she surveyed the ocean.

“If we’re lucky,” she said, “someone in the crew spotted this island, and Colón’s trying to find somewhere safe to lay anchor.”

Spotted the island? I wondered how could anyone miss it. Shielding my eyes against the white morning, I took in the view of the verdant peaks that rose out of the forest in front of us. The sight was so beautiful I almost ran and embraced it. Oh, green, green! After nine gray weeks at sea I’d forgotten such a sublime color existed. Crowned by ocean mists, the kingly face of the mountains grinned up at cloudless skies. Three cormorants soared above us before swooping down for breakfast in the sea.

Catalina and I traveled down the shoreline, avoiding washed-up seaweed and jellyfish as we went. “Where do you think we are?” I asked her as we walked.

“Java, perhaps. Or Cipango. Although the lack of pagodas is worrisome.”

“What’s a pagoda?”

“A building with golden roofs stacked on top of one another. Marco Polo spoke of them in his writings on the East. Polo wrote also of an archipelago of inhabited islands off the farthest coast of the Asian continent. If we are on one of them, surely there is someone here who can direct us to the mainland.” Yet I heard a note of doubt in her voice, doubt modulating into despair.

“Why’d you decide to help me, anyway?” I asked her. “Afraid I’d leave you all alone on this island?”

“Hardly! I was simply bored, that’s all.”

I supposed boredom was as good a motivation as any, but I couldn’t help but think there was more to it than that. Maybe she really was afraid, foundering in the dark like I was. Maybe she was searching some heroic quest to shape her life, to give it meaning. Or maybe, after nine weeks of keeping herself distant from the crew, she was simply looking for a friend.

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