Free Ten Thousand Islands by Randy Wayne White Page B

his people. He hated the Spaniards, therefore none of his people would cooperate. So the Jesuits found a traitor, a Calusa they called Felipe. Felipe lured Carlos into a trap where the Spaniards murdered him. That was the beginning of the end of the Calusa.
    At the same time, a similar drama was being played out in the Ten Thousand Islands, a region of mangroves, black water and swamp south of Marco Island. The ruling chief there was Salvador. Like Carlos, he was a human god, controlled the skies and storms, wore a royal golden medallion and carried a sacred totem. He, too, despised the Spaniards.
    To illustrate, JoAnn read part of a letter from one of the priests who tried to convert Salvador: “When my fellow priest, Fray Castillo, ordered Salvador to tell his people to pray to the True God, Salvador became angry. Salvador gave the Father a number of blows to the face. He then rubbed human excrement on the Father’s face while he was praying. Then Salvador urinated on him, saying, ‘Man boy, why are you so small?’ He then told we religious many times that they did not want to become Christians and that we should go away.”
    JoAnn added, “Because the Spaniards couldn’t make Salvador cooperate, they started recruiting a traitor. It solved the Carlos problem, so why not assassinate their second great chief?”
    I said, “Religion had an edge to it in those days.”
    “Uh-huh. What’s the biblical line? Something about a terrible swift sword.” She paused for a moment. “Funny thing is, Tomlinson said you’d understand that part easiest of all. Deposing one leader to put your own guy in power. Political assassination, that sort of thing. What’d he mean by that, Ford?”
    Very softly, I said, “One of Tomlinson’s little jokes. He thinks he’s funny.”
    The traitor selected to dispose of Salvador was an outcast shaman from a “distant land” they called Tocayo, a dangerous man, according to one of the priests, but potentially useful to the Spaniards’ cause.
    The priest wrote, “I believe that the devil is in Tocayo, yet he promises that he will accept the True God if we help him depose Salvador. Tocayo also promises that he will forsake witchcraft and burn his sacred idol and no longer kill and eat the children of his enemies, nor have unclean knowledge of his daughters. He has promised that he will remove the sodomites.”
    I said, “This was five hundred years ago?”
    JoAnn looked at the paper. “The thing I just read, about killing children and the sodomites, it was written in 1568, a little over four hundred years ago.”
    After Tocayo hacked Salvador to death, the priest returned from Havana to discover that Tocayo had murdered fifteen principal men of neighboring villages and eaten their eyes. It was a belief of the Calusa that a man’s permanent soul resides in the pupil of his eyes. The Calusa weren’t cannibals, but Tocayo was. As Lopez de Velasco wrote, “They say that their idol eats human men’s eyes.”
    Tocayo had made himself a human idol.
    The priest found Tocayo and his captains holding a celebration and dancing with the heads of four chiefs, kicking their heads through the shell courtyards as if playing at sport.
    Tocayo had also taken for himself the golden medallion—a
chaguala
—and the wooden totem, both considered sources of great power.
    I leaned a little closer to JoAnn, listening carefully as she read, “‘Fray Castillo believes that these two idols possess unholy authority. Now Tocayo guards them jealously and laughs when we ask to examine them. He tells us that Light is in one of the idols, Darkness is in the other. They are the source of all his strength and he will not part with them.
    “‘But he has kept his word on other matters. He now kneels before the cross. He is serving Your Holiness as he promised. I know that Tocayo is not a tool of the Devil. He is a tool of the One True God.’”
    JoAnn turned to me. “Dorothy found them both. The gold medallion