FLORIDA
1528
WHEN THE SLAUGHTER of the Uzita was finally done, Shako slipped from the tree and quietly escaped back into the brush. She knew she had to move quickly if she wanted to survive.
She raced back to her camp and took everything she could carry. Then she went to the cave.
At the Fountain, there was no time for ceremony. The power was not in the words, she knew. It was in the Water. And she was beyond forgiveness anyway. She filled several skins with the Water. Then she leaped into the pool herself, drinking deeply as she swam, letting the Water soak into her, saturate her, fill her up inside and out.
Her old self had died with the rest of her village. But when she emerged from the pool, she was reborn. Physically, she was stronger and smarter and now more durable than perhaps any human being had ever been.
She finally understood what her father had been trying to say. The future demanded hard choices at times. She carried that future now, and keeping it safe meant giving up on revenge, at least for a while.
Hirrihigua would not let her return to the tribe because she was carrying Simon’s child. She was tainted in his eyes, and so she was exiled. She never strayed too far, because she’d always hoped to be accepted back someday. She’d hoped her father could find a way to forgive her.
So she was nearby when Simon and his kind killed them all.
She knew she would need every gift, every advantage, for the purpose of her new life. She would hunt down everyone who participated in the slaughter of her people and make them pay in kind.
First, however, she ran. She ran because she was still outnumbered, and she didn’t yet know how to kill them all. She had to plan.
But, most important, she could not let the last of her tribe die.
She had to find a safe place to have her child.
SHE TRAVELED NORTH. SHE found other tribes there, who were far away from the ships landing on the southern coasts. At first she was greeted with suspicion. But then they saw what she could do. Her strength was greater than their most powerful men. She could heal the sickest of them, although she saved that for the young and the children. She carried steel, which most of them had never seen before. And she had all the secrets of the Water Clan to teach them, learned when she was still just a girl with the Uzita. In time, she held a place of reverence among her new people.
Her son, when he was born, was treated like a prince. He would become a great leader, even if his skin was much paler than anyone had ever seen before, and his features far more delicate than the other boys’.
The other members of Shako’s new tribe assumed it was because he’d been touched by the same strangeness that allowed Shako to live without aging and to do so many other things.
In a way, that was true, Shako supposed. He was growing in her belly when she sank into the Water and came out again. But she recognized other things in her son that had nothing to do with her. His intellect, his ambition, and his talent for war—all of those were gifts from his father.
She didn’t discourage him in any of those things. She knew what was coming. And her new family needed a warrior to lead them and protect them.
When her son was almost twenty, she left them all behind. This was only a short stop for her, a place and a time to rest. She had her own tasks ahead.
But she never forgot them, and they never forgot her. Even as they moved south, into the lands once occupied by the Uzita, the Apalachee, the Timucua, and the Mocoso. Most of those tribes were dead now, killed by either the Spaniards or the diseases the Spanish brought with them. The stragglers and survivors were welcomed by Shako’s people.
Eventually, this band of Creek forged their own identity. They traded with and occasionally fought the Europeans who kept coming to Florida. The Spanish were always slightly afraid of them.
They called them the Seminole, a corruption of the Spanish term for “runaway,” or “wild one.”
And among them, there was always a select group of the finest warriors, young men and sometimes women who represented the tribe’s future. In secret, they would travel to a place in the wilderness. There they would be taken down a path that led into a tunnel, a tunnel that opened into a cave the size of a warehouse.
At the center of this cave was a spring that fed water into a pool that glowed an eerie blue.
The young men and women would drink of the water and be made better than they were before. Then Shako would train them and send them back to their homes, where they would serve in secret: the fiercest warriors, the finest protectors. Generation after generation, they received just enough of the Water to make them strong, to make them superhuman. But she never allowed them enough to tempt or corrupt them. She made certain they were smarter than she was.
They called her Mother, for they were all her children.