The Sound of Many Waters Read Online Free PDF Page A

iniquities.”
    Dominic gazed into the darkness beyond the fire and his vision adjusted enough to see an old man with a long white beard sitting on a stump, his eyes sparkling in firelight. The old man laid a piece of oak on the fire; the flame leapt into the night and danced about like the tail of a riled rattlesnake, giving Dominic plenty of light with which to see. What he saw, however, shocked and confused him.
    The old man wore nothing but a strip of deerskin around his thighs. Ornate tattoos covered his neck and face—black spirals that could have been patterns of snail shells, fern shoots, coiled snakes or whirlpools—and small shards of bone pierced his nose and ears. His frayed, tatty beard ended at a tendril just above his distended gut, and the explosion of white hair atop his head was as disheveled as a bird’s nest. He looked absolutely feral.
    “Just like you,” the old man said, “I was a demon skulking beneath a man’s skin.”
    Dominic scowled. “You know nothing of me.”
    “I can see that you are filled with rage. Your eyes tell me that much. And I know that you have killed many people. Wickedness exudes from you like a stench.”
    “Every execution was lawful.”
    “Whose law?”
    “It was God’s will.”
    “God wills only life.”
    “No, I have seen his other side. He delights in the death of the innocent.”
    “The boy?”
    “My son.”
    “Your son is not dead. His journey continues, just not in this world.”
    “You are wrong. God in his wretchedness took him from me.”
    “You do not know God. God is good.”
    “Then untie me, and let me send you to him.”
    “It would not be so horrible, but my time is not yet. Soon, but not yet.”
    Dominic squinted, analyzing the old man’s face. “What are you?” he asked.
    “Pardon?”
    “Native? Or Spaniard?”
    “I am neither.” The old man smiled, revealing black gums that mourned teeth. “And I am both.”
    His name was Francisco de la Mar, he said, and as a young Franciscan friar many years before, he was asked to serve as priest and confessor aboard Juan Ponce de Leon’s exploratory voyage to La Florida. One night during their passage, Francisco drank too much wine, tried to urinate overboard, and fell into the sea. His absence was not discovered until daybreak. He was certain everyone presumed him dead and probably prayed mightily for the repose of his soul, but his tunic kept him afloat and he washed up alive somewhere on the coast of La Florida.
    “The Book promises that whoever calls on the name of the Lord will be saved,” said Francisco, leaning toward Dominic. “But I should have never called on him. It would have been far better for everyone had I gone to the Kingdom that day.”
    Francisco wandered the desolate beaches for several days until a hunting party of Calusa natives captured him. They beat him and spat on him and cut off one of his fingers for a taste, roasting it over a fire in front of him. To his dismay, they seemed to enjoy the flavor, and as he sat tied to a cabbage palm at the edge of their camp, he felt certain that they would consume the rest of him before dawn.
    “That’s when God sent an army of his angels to save me,” he said to Dominic.
    Francisco had seen them hiding in the trees before his captors did, fanning out noiselessly as they approached. They looked like men made of shadow save for the whites of their eyes which moved like fireflies in the darkness. Closer, closer, closer they came, and Francisco was soon more terrified of the apparent phantoms than he was of the hungry Calusa. Swiftly and with the grace of panthers they pounced. The five Calusa had little time to react and after a burst of spears and flesh they all lay dead on the ground.
    Francisco tried to stay still, he said, but the three attackers turned toward him in unison, as if guided by some hidden sense. Covered in dried mud, they loomed tall and terrible. The largest of the three approached Francisco holding a blade