Boom! Boom!...
Bang! Bang! Bang! Bang!...
"Quick! Fire the cannons again, fire the guns again! Shoot them dead!..."
"Haaha! The Holy Mother protects us! The natives fear the cannons, they're running back! The natives are going to break!"
The sun slanted westward, falling over the glittering lake bay and casting the swaying shadows of palm trees. Fat schools of fish swam upstream through the bay, and seabirds with spread wings circled in the sky. Fishponds, cassava fields, and wooden huts stretched along the lakeshore, like roots left in Cuba's hot earth by Yucahu, the Cassava God of myth, granting the Taino long-lasting peace and vitality!
Without question, this was a rich and beautiful lakeside. The Taino's great Fishery Bay Tribe was located beside the Great Lake, having inherited hundreds of peaceful springs and summers, nourishing thousands of tribesfolk. Over the past hundreds and thousands of years, the Taino had risen to work at sunrise and sung at sunset, born amid laughter and closing their eyes in tranquility, never once changing.
They ate cassava and sea fish, chewed tobacco leaves and grass stalks, prayed to their ancestors in wooden houses, and married and had children in thatched huts. They had no brutal slaughter between tribes, needed to pay no tribute of any kind, and did not even have tribal god-descendants or ranks. They raised children collectively and cared for the elderly collectively, living peacefully for decades until the slight poison of cassava accumulated and excessive tobacco leaves took their lives. They had never seen cruel blood and fire, nor had they ever known the bitter cold of autumn and winter. The utmost evil they could imagine was no more than the Siguayo Nomadic Tribe stealing fish and snatching dogs!
Yet at this moment, with the sudden arrival of the Castilian sailing