Orson Card - Pastwatch - The Redemption Of Christopher Columbus

The others came over the wall much more quickly than Cristoforo had. The only trouble was with the chest containing the logs and charts, but it was eventually handed over the top, followed by Escobedo.

"That's all of us," said Escobedo. "The Basque is already heading back to the drinking before he's missed."

"I fear for his life," said Cristoforo.

"He feared much more for yours."

The Tainos all carried weapons, but they did not brandish them or seem to be threatening in any way. And when Dead Fish took Cristoforo by the hand, the Captain-General followed him toward the woods.

Diko carefully removed the bandages. The healing was going well. She thought ruefully of the small quantity of antibiotics she had left. Oh, well. She had had enough for this, and with any luck she wouldn't need any more.

Cristoforo's eyes fluttered.

"So you aren't going to sleep forever after all," said Diko.

His eyes opened, and he tried to lift himself from the mat. He fell back at once.

"You're still weak," she said. "The flogging was bad enough, but the journey up the mountain wasn't good for you. You aren't a young man anymore."

He nodded weakly.

"Go back to sleep. Tomorrow you'll feel much better."

He shook his head. "Sees-in-the-Dark," he began.

"You can tell me tomorrow."

"I'm sorry," he said.

"Tomorrow."

"You are a daughter of God," he said. It was hard for him to speak, to get the breath for it, to form the words. But he formed them. "You are my sister. You are a Christian."

"Tomorrow," she said.

"I don't care about the gold," he said.

"I know," she answered.

"I think you come to me from God," he said.

"I have come to you to help you make true Christians of the people here. Beginning with me. Tomorrow you'll start to teach me about Christ, so I can be the first baptized in this land."

"This is why I came here," he murmured.

She stroked his hair, his shoulders, his cheek. As he drifted back to sleep, she answered him with the same words. "This is why I came here."

Within a few days, the royal officers and several more loyal men found their way up the mountain to Ankuash. Cristoforo, now able to stand and walk for a while each day, set his men to work at once, helping the villagers with their work, teaching them Spanish and learning Taino as they did. The ship's boys took to this humble work quite naturally. It was much harder for the royal officers to swallow their pride and work alongside the villagers. But there was no compulsion. As long as they refused to help, they were simply ignored, until they finally realized that in Ankuash, the old hierarchical rules no longer applied. If you weren't helping, you didn't matter. These were men who were determined to matter. Escobedo was the first to forget his rank, and Segovia the last, but that was to be expected. The heavier the burden of office, the harder it was to set it down.

Runners from the valley brought news. With the royal officers gone, Pinzўn had accepted command of the stockade, but work on the new ship soon stopped, and there were tales of fighting among the Spaniards. More men slipped away and came up the mountain. Finally it came to a pitched battle. The gunfire could be heard all the way to Ankuash.

That night a dozen men arrived in the village. Among them was Pinzўn himself, wounded in the leg and weeping because his brother Vincente, who had been captain of the Nina, was dead. When his wound had been treated, he insisted on publicly begging the Captain-General's forgiveness, which Cristoforo freely gave.

With the last restraint removed, the two dozen men remaining in the stockade ventured out to try to capture some Tainos, to make them into slaves or whores. They failed, but two Tainos and a Spaniard died in the fighting. A runner came to Diko from Guacanagari. "We will kill them now," said the messenger. "Only the evil ones are left."

"I told Guacanagari it would be obvious when the time came. But because you waited, there will only be a few of them, and you'll beat them easily."

The remaining mutineers slept in foolish security within their stockade, then woke in the morning to find their watchmen dead and the stockade filled with angry and well-armed Tainos. They learned that the gentleness of the Tainos was only one aspect of their character.

By the summer solstice of 1493, all the people of Ankuash had been baptized, and those Spaniards who had learned enough Taino to get along were permitted to begin courting young women from Ankuash or other villages. As the Spanish learned Taino ways, so also the villagers began to learn from the Spanish.

"They're forgetting to be Spanish," Segovia complained to Cristoforo one day.

"But the Taino are also forgetting to be Taino," Cristoforo replied. "They're becoming something new, something that has hardly been seen in the world before."

"And what is that?" demanded Segovia.

"I'm not sure, " said Cristoforo. "Christians, I think."

In the meantime, Cristoforo and Sees-in-the-Dark talked for many hours each day, and gradually he began to realize that despite all the secrets that she knew and all the strange powers that she seemed to have, she was not an angel or any other kind of supernatural being. She was a woman, still young, yet with a great deal of pain and wisdom in her eyes. She was a woman, and she was his friend. Why should that have surprised him? It was always from the love of strong women that he had found whatever joy had been granted him in his life.

It was a meeting that would live in history.

Cristobal Colўn was the European who had created the Carib League, a confederation of Christian tribes in all the lands surrounding the Carib Sea on the east, the north, and the south.

Yax was the Zapotec king who, building on his father's work in uniting all the Zapotec tribes and forming an alliance with the Tarascan Empire, conquered the Aztecs and brought his ironworking and shipbuilding kingdom to the highest cultural level achieved in the western hemisphere.

Their achievements were remarkably parallel. Both men had put a stop to the ubiquitous practice of human sacrifice in the lands they governed. Both men had adopted a form of Christianity, which was easily united when they met. Colўn and his men had taught European navigation and some shipbuilding techniques to the Tainos and, when they were converted to Christianity, the Caribs as well; under Yax, Zapotec ships traded far and wide, along both coasts of the Zapotec Empire. While the Carib islands were too poor in iron for them to match the achievements of the Tarascan metalsmiths, when Colўn and Yax united their empires into one nation, there were still enough of Colўn's European crew who knew ironworking that they were able to help the Tarascans make the leap forward into gunsmithing.

Historians looked back on their meeting at Chichen Itza as the greatest moment of reconciliation in history. Imagine what would have happened if Alexander, instead of conquering the Persians, had united with them. If the Romans and Parthians had become a single nation. If the Christians and Muslims, if the Mongols and the Han ...

But it was unimaginable. The only reason they could believe it was possible with the Carib League and the Zapotec Empire was that it actually happened.

In the great central plaza of Chichen Itza, where once human sacrifice and torture had been offered to Mayan gods, the Christian Colўn embraced the heathen Yax, and then baptized him. Colўn presented his daughter and heir, Beatrice Tagiri Colўn, and Yax presented his son and heir, Ya-Hunahpu Ipoxtli. They were married on the spot, whereupon both Colўn and Yax abdicated in favor of their children. Of course they would both remain the powers behind the throne until their deaths, but the alliance held, and the nation known as Caribia was born.