Pale riders wandered across the great island of Puerto Rico, spreading invisible death, bringing dense blisters and festering sores, taking countless lives from the Taino tribes. And an even more vicious, more terrible danger was still brewing, one that would be unleashed by the demons' own hands.
"We once struck the ear bones of the Ancestral Spirits with jade, but no answer came.
The flowers and birds before the shrine have withered, and the Priest's hands have been bitten voiceless by red rashes.
Grandmother's eyes closed last night; her breathing was like Bamboo Leaf torn by the wind, softly, softly, drifting away~~"
As the first native tribe to come into contact with the smallpox plague, beside countless fallen and dead loved ones, the Taino wept and sang in such despair, telling of a death whose origin they did not know and against which they had no way to fight.
"Babies, one by one, turned into silence beneath turtle shells; mothers buried them in Palm leaves, not daring to cry aloud, afraid that the Plague Fire would hear and come again to lick away their last flesh and bone.
We split open coconut shells and found no medicine; we burned conch shells on the fire, but The Moon in the sky also began to grow spots, sick just like us."
The colonizers had brought smallpox from the Old Continent, and had spread it deliberately. When this invisible, colorless smallpox plague fell upon the native peoples of the Americas who were encountering it for the first time, it was far more dangerous and cruel than it was to the infected of the Old Continent! In the Europe of the present day, smallpox's death rate, after raging for over a thousand years, had already fallen to thirty or forty percent. But after it