Cold Steel

9

Yet instead of falling, I held on. Nothing, not even my sire’s vile threat, could make me give up. The rocking ceased, and I found myself back on the tree as abruptly as if I had never left it. Clutching the nub of a broken branch, I heaved myself up, gritting past the blaze of pain in my right shoulder and left hand. The pain told me that what I had witnessed was real, not a dream.

As I climbed, the air changed texture, stirred by a guava-scented wind. I emerged into the hollow trunk of a ceiba tree so huge that the buttressing of its aboveground roots rose like the pillars of a house over my head. The chittering of Rory’s captors echoed around me, but I could not see them. I sought threads of shadow to conceal myself, but here in the spirit world the shadows were like eels, too slippery to hold. Skulking in the tangle of roots, furious and almost weeping at losing Vai when I had come so close to him, I probed at my shoulder. Just below the collarbone rose a puckered scar, tender to the touch. The fingers of my left hand were scored with whitened scars, cleanly healed. The ache subsided to that of an injury sustained days ago instead of moments. The speed of healing was a brutal reminder of how time passed differently in the spirit world, where an hour might equate to days in the mortal world and a day to months. How much time had passed in the mortal world just while I climbed the tree? How far away was Vai now?

Hidden within the roots, I peered onto open ground, my first glimpse of the spirit world here in Taino country. In the heavens, no sun or moon shone. The sky had a silvery-white sheen like the inside of a conch shell. Straight ahead lay a monumental ballcourt where figures played batey, the game so beloved in Expedition and throughout the Antilles. The players ran up and down the ballcourt bouncing a rubber ball off thighs or forearms or elbows, never letting it touch the ground. They even bounced the ball off stone belts they wore around their hips, although in Expedition no one used the traditional gear.

At the end of the ballcourt closest to me rose a stone platform. A man sat there, cross-legged, watching the game. He wore a headdress ridged with feathers as in imitation of a troll’s bright crest, a white cotton loin wrap, and armlets of beaten gold. His septum was pierced by a needle of pale green jade, and he wore dangling earrings carved out of bone. One step below him, a rabbit dressed in a loin wrap was seated at a sloped writing desk with a brush in hand, busily writing in sweeping strokes as its ears twitched.

I crossed the plaza, climbed four steps, and halted below the lord.

“You’re the Thunder, the Herald of the storm the people call hurricane.”

“Here you are, Cousin,” said the Thunder, unsurprised by my arrival. “By what name should I call you?”

“People call me Cat,” I replied, for I knew better than to reveal my full name. “Why did you take my brother?”

“You took a life. We took a life.”

Dread chilled my heart. “Have you killed my brother?”

“Death is merely the other side of the island.”

“I haven’t the knowledge to debate questions of natural philosophy with you. I just want my brother back.”

“It is time for the match. Batey is the game.” He gestured toward the ballcourt. At the motion of his hand, thunder grumbled beneath my feet. “If you score, then we shall give you a chance to stand before the elders and defend yourself against the accusation laid against you. On behalf of the spirit lord you call the Master of the Wild Hunt, you cut a path into our country and allowed him to kill here as if he possessed the right to do so when he possesses no such right. Think how we must look at you, Cousin! We let you walk in our land as a guest, and you betrayed us.”

My head was still spinning with the vision of Vai encased in ice. “So if I score a point, I’ll be allowed to stand trial before a hostile assembly? That’s my chance?”

“If you don’t choose to speak in your own defense, it’s no skin off my nose.”

“It scarcely seems a sporting game if I’m obliged to play a game I only learned a few months ago against spirits and opia who have played for time uncounted.”

“I freely offer you a gift, Cousin.” A skull inset with beads and gems sat by his right knee, and I was sure it was watching me, for its hollow eyes gleamed. “The gift of the skill you would have achieved had you played the game for as long as these others have.”

I had to take the chances I was offered. “That seems fair. I agree only if all responsibility falls to me. If the ancestors find I am not at fault, then my brother and I are both free to go.”

“We are agreed.”

“I’ll need leather cords to tie up my skirt.”

The rabbit scribe set down its pen and tossed me a rope of braided cords. I untangled the cords and used them to secure my skirt at knee length. I still wore only my sleeveless bodice.

Thunder himself fitted me with arm guards. There was something not intrusive but intimate in the way he handled my body. He did not loom or leer, but I felt the spark all the same. Loving Vai had opened my eyes to the currents that roil the waters between people who feel attraction one for the other. But while I might have been appreciative, I was not tempted. I smiled to show I understood his game, and I stepped back politely.

He looked me up and down suggestively. “Do you play with the sword attached? Like a man? It will only get in your way.”

“I will not give the sword into anyone’s hand except my brother’s.” Although I looked around the central area, I could not see Rory. “If you bring him to me and let him watch, then I will let him hold it for me.”

“You do not ask what will happen if you do not score a point.”

“I see no need to ask,” I said.

He laughed. A second laugh echoed him in a mist of rain. At the other end of the ballcourt rose another platform. There another man sat cross-legged. He had skin the color of waves and hair like long brown seaweed: It was Thunder’s brother, Flood, he who had almost drowned me when I had been trapped beneath an overturned boat.

Vai had saved me from the flood.

Resolve steeled my heart. I would not let them intimidate me. “There’s no reason for me to play if I don’t know my brother is safe.”

“I agree,” said Thunder with a suspiciously amused smile. I scarcely had time to blink before a bedraggled saber-toothed cat appeared under the ceiba tree’s lofty roots. With amber eyes fixed on me, he limped the long painful way to the platform. When he arrived, I examined his shoulder. Like my injuries, the wounds were healing unnaturally fast. I pressed a cheek into the coarse black fur of his head, stroking behind his ears.

“I give my sword into your care until I come back for it. Wait for my signal. We may have to retreat quickly.”

I lashed the sword to his body, took a swig of the potent ginger beer, and rubbed my nose against his dry one. At last, I descended onto the ballcourt.

The stone risers, where onlookers sat, swarmed with people and spirits and creatures, some wearing the same form and others shifting through faces as if they had no face of their own. The force of all those gazes made me tremendously uncomfortable, for I preferred the shadows. The players had gathered along the walls of the ballcourt. Most looked as human as I did, but some had the heads of animals or had claws or paws or furled wings. The crowd roared as I looked around to see who would play with me, for alone I could not possibly score. Maybe this was the trick by which Thunder meant to defeat me.

A man strode out to greet me. “Reckon yee don’ know me, gal. Yee saved me from under a boat.”

I’d only briefly caught a glimpse of the frail old man I’d helped rescue from beneath a boathouse during a hurricane. This man was younger, all sinewy flesh and muscle. He looked like a person who might know how to play batey.

“My thanks.”

He grinned in a likable way, then whistled. More men and women trotted out from the shadows to join us. One introduced himself as Aunty Djeneba’s deceased husband; others were the deceased relatives of the household or kin of people I had a friendly relationship with in Expedition. They were all the spirits of dead ancestors. I knew it because they had no navels. I thanked them and shook their hands in the radical manner. The more recently dead received the gesture with smiles while the older ones were puzzled, for it was a manner of greeting they’d never before seen.

The opposing team assembled. A man pushed to the front like a captain coming to lead his troops. He looked exactly as my husband would have if he had been stripped down to the short cotton loin-skirt worn for batey by men. I stared, my mouth gone quite dry.

He had no navel. Could he be my sire? Was that the trick?

I whispered into the ear of the dead boatman. “He can’t be the opia of my husband, for my husband isn’t dead. Is he a maku?”

“He smell of cohoba and tobacco, like a Taino lord might. I know not who he is. Peradventure he have taken a dislike to yee and mean to distract yee.”

I could play that game! I took a moment to admire how well the opia had transformed himself into Vai’s skin, for his bare shoulders and chest and thighs really were quite admirable, so I admired them with a lift of my eyebrows that made his lovely eyes narrow as if he were bracing for me to cast a spear that he must bat aside.

“You don’t frighten me,” I said. “Quite the contrary.”

He grinned a challenge.

Thunder raised a feathered scepter. A ball dropped into the game. The spirit lord who appeared in the form of Vai tapped it up and down on his knees, never letting it touch the dirt. It was no rubber ball. It was a head with black hair tied into a club. Its waxy features stared.

We were playing batey with the head of the cacica, Queen Anacaona, the mother of the twins Prince Caonabo and the exiled Prince Haübey, called Juba.

But I was the hunter’s daughter. I had to admire their ruthless maneuvering.

Let it begin.

I dashed in and caught the head on my elbow, stealing it away from the spirit lord. As I passed the ball to the boatman, I caught the lord’s ankle with a sweep of my leg and tripped him. He fell as I dodged past. He grabbed my ankle, yanked me down hard, and rolled us over so I had my back to the dirt and his weight and attractively bare torso pressed on top of me.

“You’re not going to play fair, are you?” I demanded.

With his lips a breath away from my own, like Vai about to press a kiss onto my mouth, he spoke. “Where do yee think this shall end?”

“Not with you winning!” The pulse of the game made my heart race and my blood burn.

Voices surged like the sea around us. The footfalls of the running players made a constant tremor, shivering out on all sides through the beaten earth of the court.

I kissed him. His lips were dry; mine were dusty. Surprised by my riposte, he forgot himself, and another face spilled through Vai’s features too quickly for me to recognize before it settled back into Vai’s form. It was definitely not my sire.

I dug a knee up into his groin and shoved him sideways while he was yelping. As I scrambled up, I scanned the ballcourt. The ball was flying back right at me, the dead face frozen in a grimace. I struck the head with a flip of my hip and angled it toward Aunty Djeneba’s husband. Then we ran, never letting the head drop. The ebb and flow of play meant that the head bounced between sides. Here in the spirit world, the players were too good ever to let the ball touch the ground.

You would think they did nothing but play across the ballcourt of eternity, and maybe that was all they did. I wouldn’t mind doing that. A gal could play batey all day and lose all track of time if her limbs never grew weak and her throat never croaked with thirst. My cheeks were flushed, and my heart was singing.

I caught sight of the face of the man who wore the features of my husband. He was smiling arrogantly in exactly that triumphant way Vai had when he knew he’d bested you.

Noble Ba’al! They meant to distract me by gifting me with the ability to play well enough to keep up with them. I could lose myself in the play for a hundred years and forget everything but the thrill of my pounding heart and my gaze fixed on the ball, seeking an opening. I had to concentrate.

I ran up beside the boatman. “I need to score a goal,” I said.

He nodded. “We shall position yee up to the western eye. Yee must manage the rest, gal.”

I raced sideways to the west flank of the ballcourt, marked by carvings of owls, as he worked my teammates down the court with the ball between them. So had I helped him once, risking my life for no benefit except that it was the right thing to do. Every time one of our opponents would catch the ball on knee or elbow or hip, my team would steal it back.

The head spun to me at exactly the right speed and angle. A slap with my elbow sent it flying through the hurricane’s eye, a stone circle.

The ballcourt dissolved around me into a swirl of angry mist as the helpful opia fled laughing and my opponents cursed and shrieked.

I stood in a Taino house large enough that it easily sheltered many serious-looking men and women dressed in white cotton and adorned with feather headdresses, beaded collars, and jade bracelets. The roof was lost in shadow far above, sprinkled with lights like stars. Vines grew up the huge wood pillars that held the roof. From the ceiling beams hung painted gourds as vast as ponds and sloshing with fish. A mound of young cassava plants surrounded me. I stood with my sandals in the dirt; leaves tickled my calves. A saber-toothed cat slouched into view behind the seated personages, my sword tied over its back. He turned aside to drink from a pool of water.

“Rory!” I cried. “Never touch food or drink in the spirit world!”

He raised his head to remind me he was a spirit creature. His tail lashed.

A round object hurtled through the air right at me. Reflexively, I caught it as it thumped into my chest.

The head of Queen Anacaona had fallen into my arms.

Her dead gaze met mine in a most disconcerting way. “Speak truth, maku. Speak now before the ancestors. Who is responsible for my death?”