The islands of the Caribbean were green. Mangroves stretched along the coast, thinning only when they reached the Taino villages by the river bends. Shrubs and tall grass grew wild across the open fields, and vivid tropical flowers bloomed in every season.
The local Taino tribes would pick flowers of every color, gather bright, many-hued snails, then pile together smooth, colorful pebbles into small altars that held the spirit tablets of the Zemi. Then the young men and women would dance before the Zemi altars, while the elders gathered to smoke and sing songs passed down from ancient times. This had once been a peaceful, gentle, and beautiful Taino village, as it had been for thousands upon thousands of years.
Yet the arrival of the Castilian Expeditionary Force utterly destroyed everything. In the natural harbor, masts stood thick as a forest, and cross banners flew over the occupied Taino roundhouses. The old, the weak, the able-bodied, and the strong of the tribe had all been turned into bloody mud and burned into blue smoke. Only scarred women remained, curled up in the church where they clung to a meager safety. And this church had once been the ancestral longhouse where the tribe sang in joy, yet not a single wooden tablet of the ancestors remained. All the beauty of the past had burned to ash and fallen into the Abyss of death.
At this moment, outside the "dead" Taino village, two utterly different forces were facing each other on the open field. On one side were more than four hundred men of the Castilian Expeditionary Force; on the other were over a thousand Taino fighting men.
Among the Castilian Expeditionary Force, the left wing was made up of 140 Holy Roman Empire Mercenaries. Their front rank was Spearmen, wearing heavy