Byzantium (16 page)

“Don Juan,” Don Ignacio said to Mota. “I almost don’t believe my eyes. What brings you here?” The
alcalde
looked at the others, his jowls and neck loose with lost flesh. “You must be hungry, tired. Please, do me the honor of a visit. All your party are welcome to my home.”

As soon as Mota accepted the offer, Don Ignacio turned and whistled, and two sour-faced Tepeque servants ambled from the house and guided the horses and mules into the courtyard. The animals stabled, Don Ignacio invited the white men to his second-floor parlor—Baltazar and El Sepo, Indian and mulatto, were to stay behind with the beasts—and begged them to sit while he busied himself at a broad, creaking credenza along the back wall, unlocking one of its cabinets with a key tied around his neck. Mota looked about the room. At first glance, it seemed in order, but on closer inspection he noted pale beards of dust hanging from the walls, holes in the curtains where insects had gnawed unchecked.

A pleased sigh emerged from the credenza, and, inching back out, Don Ignacio brought forth a half-emptied bottle of Madeira. After he stood he straightened his loose trousers and coat, then poured precise, small volumes of the wine into four glasses. He handed Mota the first.

“I hope you have not come to tax us more,” Don Ignacio said.

“Don’t worry,” Mota answered. “My business is to the north.”

“Is it?” Don Ignacio asked, then moved away to hand around the other glasses.

“Far to the north,” Mota said. He sipped his Madeira. “But I confess,” he added, “I never expected to find Zacatecas in such straits.”

“Temporary, temporary,” Don Ignacio said. “The vein will be found. The mines will be drained. The Crown will show mercy. I’m sure of it.” He sat in the high-backed, spindle-legged chair he’d saved for himself, then looked at Mota, Fernando, and Father Pascual in turn. “Come now. I have heard a story. You are seeking Tayopa.”

Mota shifted in his seat, turned his glass in his fingers. “It is just that,” he said. “A story.”

Don Ignacio grinned. “I’ve heard slabs of silver were left there, sitting out, waiting to be taken. I have two daughters in the convent. They send me tearstained letters. Their habits give them rashes.

They freeze at night and the nuns take away their blankets. One slab—just one slab—would see them married off.”

Mota looked at the man. He remembered Don Ignacio’s daughters, two egg-shaped creatures stuffed into silk. The last time he had visited, they had sat at the end of the room, large-eyed and silent as they snuck strips of ham from their handkerchiefs into their lapdogs’ mouths. Then the
shatter-thump
of the stamping mills had resounded through the valley, reached even the
alcalde
’s curtained parlor, and Don Ignacio had been trying to distract him—with false protests and complaints—from the assay office accounts.

“The mine is fantasy,” Mota said, and at this Don Ignacio remained silent until, some minutes later, a bell summoned them to a dinner of meatless stew.

Later that evening, past midnight, Mota woke to a rustling. He’d slept lightly, uncomfortable in Don Ignacio’s house. Now, leaning his head up, he saw a figure crouched before his spilled packs: one of the Tepeques, turning papers over in the moonlight. Mota took his dagger from beneath his pillow and crept up to the Indian. Clapping one hand over the man’s mouth, he brought the dagger point to his throat with the other. At the touch of steel, the Tepeque stiffened in his arms. Mota thought about pulling the dagger closer, feeling it slice into flesh, letting the Tepeque’s blood stream over his fingers. He’d awoken clenched by a sorrow, and he hungered for whatever alchemy the Tepeque’s blood might work in his heart. But instead, after holding him a little longer, he dragged the Indian to the door and with a kick set him free. Then he roused the others and within fifteen minutes they were riding out of town on the northern trail.

HIS BRIEF TIME WITH MARÍA ISABEL, Mota had long decided, had simply been an aberration from his life’s regular, solitary course.

While a boy in Seville, he’d often sat in the corner of his father’s study, alone, and watched the other children in his quarter with a cold eye. They sometimes played beneath the study’s window, and after they had left, in pursuit of some other pleasure, Mota would slip into the street to pick up the pig’s bladder they had abandoned—he would blow into it, as they had, and marvel at how it stretched—or hide where the cleverest had hid during their last game. Sometimes the children found him and invited him to play. He would run with them as they made faces at the wandering Capuchin mendicant, stole a cone of sugar from the grocer’s cart, halted with a hush before a bearded, iron-chested soldier on his mount. But always he felt a shadow between himself and those who were briefly his fellows.

The shadow had returned once María Isabel was put in the ground. During the years following Cuencamé, when Mota performed his work, assaying ores and checking ledgers, he shut himself away from others, and as his story was learned the people of the camps treated him with a careful respect, believing him to be in the grip of a melancholy that in time, as his injured heart healed, would be sloughed off. But he remained unchanged, and eventually their respect turned to disdain. They said he was like a spoiled child fed only on sweets, that he let pain rot within him. When Mota overheard this he agreed: he could feel the rot just beneath his skin, viscid and black.

IN DURANGO, cattle filled the streets, lowing and raising a dust that dimmed the sky while
vaqueros
circled and struck them with tasseled whips, readying them for the drive to the great mining camps at Parral. Two days beyond the town they crossed mud flats and wide salt marshes, then switch-backed up a rocky gap in the Sierra San Andrés. During the uprising, Father Pascual told them, a band of Conchos had set up in the gap and waylaid refugees from the coast. After the Conchos returned to the north, he’d heard, a presidio captain’s daughter, a girl of thirteen, came out of the hills, belly round with child, tongue clipped from her mouth.

Six days later Mota and his men reached the ragged settlement that was Tamotchala, a single street of tents and half-finished adobe houses. In its fly-filled market Indians sat with vegetables and twists of rusted tin on their blankets, gathered from who knew where, while scrawny mules stood roped together, avoiding sale. It was a desperate, dreary place, but Mota, despite himself, felt a muffled fluttering in his gut. He had been to Tamotchala just once before, to inspect the nearby Ojo de Dios mine, a pit worked by a handful of creoles and half bloods living beneath stick shelters. But he’d never been beyond the town. Few had. Above Tamotchala spread the blank parchment of the viceroy’s map.

A SANDY INDIAN TRACK LED NORTH and cut through a forest of dry, tangled trees choked with cactus. Mota and the others picked it up just across the river from Tamotchala and for days followed it without event. They passed two abandoned settlers’ clearings, cabins burned and corrals torn down during the uprising, and after the fourth stream they crossed they came upon patches of tilled bean fields, a village of dried mud, and a square of ash and blackened timber. Indians in the fields and in the mud houses stopped their work and looked.

“These are the Mayos,” Father Pascual whispered in Mota’s ear. “That”—he nodded discreetly at the ashen square—“was one of our missions.”

The Mayos watched as Mota and the others passed through. It seemed to satisfy the Indians that the party wasn’t stopping but continuing on. Over the next days the forest began to thin. Their third day from the village, they rode past bleached bones, and the sixth day out they arrived at the grassy edge of a wide river. Mota saw a mud break in the distant reeds, the track continuing on the river’s other side. But before he could ford the river, Father Pascual stopped him. They had entered Yaqui territory, and this was the water they must follow east.

“First to the village of Bacom,” Father Pascual said, “and from there to Cocorim, and then into the mountains.”

Cottonwoods grew along the river, but soon gave way to another bean field, at the end of which was a village much like that of the Mayos, with mud houses and a few old stilt huts of mat and cane. As they approached the village, Father Pascual hung at the back. Since leaving Mexico, he had grown out his beard, and now he pressed his hat low on his head.

Just as in the Mayo village, they were watched from hut and field, but here an old man in a long cotton shirt waited for them in the middle of the track. He didn’t move as Mota approached, and when Mota halted the old man asked their business in piecemeal Spanish.

“We’re riding into the mountains,” Mota said. He had worried there might be trouble when they reached this part of the journey. It was from here, the country along the river, the Jesuits had taken their slaves. But the soldiers had been cruel when they came north to put down the rebellion, and Mota hoped the memory of that cruelty would be fresh in the Yaquis’ minds, make them wary and timid. He listened to the dull slide of metal against leather, El Sepo drawing his ivory-handled stiletto.

The old Yaqui spat. “Nothing good in the mountains.”

“We go under orders of the king. We have no dealings with the Jesuits.”

“Mountains empty,” the old Yaqui said. “You turn back.” He watched Mota with flinty eyes, but when Mota spurred his horse, the man got out of his way.

Messengers must have sprinted through the bean fields with whispers of their arrival, for in the next village—the one called Cocorim—Yaquis lined the path. No one tried to stop Mota or the others, but one Yaqui danced before them as they rode, contorting to show the curdled skin of his burnt shoulder, the ridged lash marks along his back, his broken, twisted arm. He yelped and turned, and as Mota watched him turn again he saw the vacancy in his rolling eyes, the absence of a reason long since lost.

AFTER MARÍA ISABEL, Mota had made formal court to no other woman. At times on his journeys daughters were presented to him like goods at auction; he would politely confess their charms and keep a committed bachelor’s distance. Beyond the occasional camp woman and the more common stretches of solitude, he’d confined his desires to the widowed sister of the baker from whom he rented his room in Mexico, and the skinny, untended wife of a Pueblo horse dealer, who preferred to meet him in the stable and wear a blindfold while he took her from behind. Like the beasts, she insisted—she would have it no other way. But in the last year the baker’s widowed sister had cut off their liaison, as she was being courted in earnest by a pastry maker, and the horse dealer’s wife had suddenly turned pious, pretending not to know him the last two times he had visited. Without their comforts, he’d felt the rot spread through him unchecked. New Spain, that great mill to which the unhappy and disappointed of the world came to be stamped anew, had left him ever as he was.

Then the viceroy had spoken the name Tayopa, and Mota’s heart had beaten briefly within his chest. He cursed himself as a fool, but such discoveries had transformed other men. He often saw them racing their pasteled carriages through the streets of Mexico, laughter and feminine squeals escaping from their windows.

WITHIN TWO DAYS they were beyond Yaqui lands. Now the river bent, flowing from the north, and they kept alongside it, riding into craggy foothills grown with sparse stands of oak and pine. Mountain Indians—Opata—were said to live here, but there was no trace of them, and blended in with the regular tick of nature’s chatter there seemed a particular silence.

After another day’s ride they passed through a scattering of abandoned stone huts, and four days later they came to a bottleneck too narrow to lead their mounts through. Without speaking they backtracked, and when Mota spotted an animal path they walked the horses and mules up it until they reached a small plateau, which gave onto a new canyon. They halted there while Fernando penciled their trail and El Sepo looked through the spyglass. Mota took a piece of biscuit from his pack. He was picking out weevils with the point of his knife when he heard El Sepo whisper, “Cattle.”

Putting the biscuit in his pocket, Mota took the spyglass from El Sepo and looked where he pointed. In the canyon below, four mottled cows stood in a clump of dried grass. Their ribs showed through their hides; they looked lost, half-wild, and Mota wondered how they had gotten here. Then he moved the spyglass, and the air caught in his lungs. On a rock, watching over the cattle, sat a woman. Long hair hung loose over her back. Mota goaded his horse over to Father Pascual.

“I thought this country was empty,” he said, keeping his voice low.

THEY RODE DOWN. Their path took them through several knots of pine, blocking their view of the woman’s rock, and when they reached the bottom of the canyon she was gone.

Mota sent El Sepo to track the woman while he and the others waited by the stream. Perhaps they should ignore her and travel on, but he’d seen through the glass that she wasn’t an Indian and he was curious. Besides, she might know something of the mine.

When El Sepo returned, he reported that the woman was hiding in a cave. He told too of a hut farther up the canyon—likely the woman’s—and Mota sent the others there to wait. Meanwhile he followed El Sepo up a path and then a ledge into a blind hollow high above the canyon. Here the cave opened atop a slope of red dirt. Mota motioned for El Sepo to stay where he was while he climbed. A few feet from the cave’s mouth, he stopped. The sun was directly above, and no light fell into the cave’s interior. “Don’t be frightened,” Mota shouted. “We only want to talk to you. We’ve come from Mexico. We can take you there, or to any town on our path.”

There was no answer. Mota looked down at El Sepo. El Sepo shrugged.

“I’m coming inside,” Mota said to the cave, and stepped in.

Beyond the first, penumbral feet, the cave’s void was entire. Mota fumbled over a blind jag of rocks, then stopped and listened. Silence. She was there, somewhere before him, behind the darkness. He strained his eyes, willed them to adjust. They refused, flooded black, liquid and numb. Mota moved forward, then stopped again when he heard the scrape of bare feet.