Salt River — Cabo de las Flechas

The Spanish make landfall at Salt River Bay on the afternoon of the fourteenth. There are twenty-two men in the landing party. They are the second voyage’s reconnaissance contingent. They are looking for fresh water and a careened-bottom site for the smaller of the two caravels.

The Kalinago are on the ridge. They are not, as the official chronicle will record, encountered by chance. They have been on the ridge since dawn. They have been on this ridge, on this date, since their grandfathers cut the window above the bay and aimed it at a disc on a cay downstream — a window the Spanish will, in five hundred years of chronicling, never notice.

Hayuya is the youngest of the defender-cousins. He has been training for this morning since he was nine. He carries his father’s bow. The cousins have taken their positions at the count the elder behique gave them last night. They are not random skirmishers. They are sightline defenders.

The tall stranger steps ashore. The cousins count his paces. At seven, Hayuya releases.

The arrow is in the air for less than a second. It strikes the stranger’s leather jerkin above the heart and embeds three inches. The stranger does not fall. The cousins are not aiming to fall him; they are aiming to count him. The wound is the count. The wound will, when reported in the landing officer’s ship-log that night, be entered as struck at the seventh stride from the boat-line. The seventh stride is the count Hayuya was given.

The Spanish open fire. The cousins withdraw up the ridge. Hayuya is the last to go. He stops at the high mark to look back. The pale man, on the next ridge above him, raises one hand. Hayuya raises his bow.

The pale man — who was at Iya-iya in 1000 AD when the behiques first read him; who watched Guarionex cut the window in 1490; who will be at Port Royal in 1692 when the Brethren captain drowns the fragment — has not aged in five centuries. He nods once. He turns away.

The Spanish, that evening, name the cape Cabo de las Flechas. Cape of Arrows. The name will stick. The chroniclers will record the encounter as the first armed clash in the New World. They will not record it as anything other than the random misfortune of a Spanish landing party that ran into unfriendly natives.

What it was, of course, was the line’s first work against the second arrival. The work the behiques set in 1000 AD, completed in 1490, executed on 14 November 1493.

The Salt River slab — the cradle that will hold the two discs Iris recovers in Book One — has been in the ground at the bay’s western edge since Hayuya’s grandfather’s grandfather laid it. The slab carries three Mesoamerican glyphs on its upper edge. The glyphs are planted, openly, on the page of Book One Chapter 22. The chain’s first extension into a third culture will, in the origin trilogy, get its own story.

But that is later. On this afternoon, at Salt River, the line has just released its first arrow against the empire that has come to bury it.

The line, in 2026, will read what the empire did not.

The audience has been listening since 1000 AD.

The team will, by the end of the third volume, learn what was being said.