FLORIDA
1528
SHAKO SAW THE Uzita die—everyone she’d ever known, her entire life—right before her eyes.
She forced herself to watch every moment from her hiding place in the trees, at the edge of the village. If she had arrived a little sooner, she might have warned her people. She was never far from the Uzita, even though she was no longer one of them. She could not bring herself to go too far.
Something between Shako and her father had broken when she pleaded for Simon’s life. The rage that had spilled out of him vanished, only to be replaced with a grim and relentless disgust. He would not speak to her for days afterward. No one else did, either. She was an outcast living in their midst.
He tried to explain it to her once. It was late at night, and they were alone in the ceremonial house, the place where no one lived but the spirits. He brought her inside. Shako wondered if he would finally hear her apologies.
But Hirrihigua wanted to speak, not to listen. He wanted to explain.
Her father said that when he learned the invaders were coming—the first time they heard rumors of strange, pale men with exotic weapons and animals, arriving in huge boats at their shores—he knew that it would be a fight for survival. Whatever else those weird visitors were, they were men. And men always behaved in the same way. They took what they could and they would not be satisfied until they had it all. As chief, Hirrihigua had seen years where famine threatened the Uzita. He’d made hard choices long before Shako and her siblings were born. There were times when he could see their future extinguished by too many hungry mouths. In those times, he had led his people against neighboring tribes and taken whatever they had, so that his own children might live. He knew why people looked to conquer others. He knew that no one ever left his home without looking to take something back to it. If the strange men had come all the way across the world, farther than anyone had ever gone before, then they must, naturally, expect to take more than anyone had ever taken before.
Given the chance, he knew they would find the Water. And they would drink it, and then they would swarm across the land, undying and eternally voracious, consuming everything in their path.
Hirrihigua would not allow that. Like all of the other chiefs before him, he knew that the Water was too dangerous. He swore, as they did, to protect it—which meant to keep the world safe from it, as well as keeping it from the world.
But he could not do that alone. This was why he’d promised her to Yaha. His tribe had to be stronger, had to be united, against the threat that was coming. Her happiness, her desires, they were small sacrifices to make for another generation of Uzita children. Shako hadn’t seen it because she did not want to believe in anything more than the immediate future. She was young. That was her failing. That alone might have been forgivable.
But to lie down with one of the invaders? To reveal to him their secrets? To betray everything she’d been since the day she was born?
“You brought him into our world,” he said. “You gave him yourself, and you gave him all of us as well.”
In her father’s eyes, she had become inhuman. There was no forgiving that.
She tried to speak, but he left her in the ceremonial house alone.
Her father’s last words to Shako came in front of the entire village. He gathered them all to hear.
He told her to go. To disappear. She had separated herself willingly from the Uzita, and so she could no longer be a part of them. She cried and pleaded. He would not answer her, even when tears began to roll down his own face. The other men and women—even her own brothers and sisters—threw rocks at her when she would not leave.
Despite her father’s order of exile, she could not bring herself to go very far. She lived in a small camp less than a mile away, hidden in a pocket of cypress and mangroves. Perhaps she still held out some hope of reconciliation, if not actual forgiveness. And there were those who left food out for her, and clothes, and other things she needed to survive. She learned to steal into the village in the dead of night, when her father’s sentries would deliberately look the other way.
Then one morning, she heard the screams coming from the village.
She rushed back, but the noise and smoke told her it was already too late. Still, she had to see. She climbed into a tree and, hidden by the leaves, watched the Spaniards destroy her world.
She saw children stuck on pikes. One brother cut in half by the exploding weapons of the conquistadors. Her mother stabbed, over and over. And her father’s corpse at the center of it all.
She saw Simón and his friends, too. Simón covered his eyes as he was dragged to safety, as if he could not stand to see what he’d caused.
His cowardice repulsed her. Every feeling she’d ever had for him curdled into disgust. She knew she was as much to blame for this as he was. But she would watch. She let the fires burn it all into her memory. Even as she wept, she would not allow herself to flinch.
She wanted to remember all of it. Every moment, every horror, and especially every face of every Spaniard.
As for Simón and the others, she would make each of them suffer. No matter how long it took. Because now she had nothing but time.