Other Lives (7 page)
Authors: Silvia Moreno-Garcia
“Mmm,” Leocadia said and she bent down, looking at his toolbox with all its compartments. There were pigments and brushes and pencils neatly arranged in rows. He was drawing the temple, neatly capturing her stone lion.
“Your town will appear on maps and more people can come through. It’s good for commerce.”
Leocadia fingered a lens, holding it up towards the sun.
“There’s nothing to trade except salt,” she said. “Who will come across the plain for that?”
“I did.”
“Seems like a waste of time.”
“You don’t like the salt flat? I think it looks pretty.”
“Oh, I love the salt,” Leocadia said. “When it rains over the salt plain – once or twice every year – the salt reflects the sky like a great white mirror and it seems like you are walking through clouds. The salt, the desert, those I love. But I don’t like Comba much.”
“How come?’
Leocadia raised her head and stared at the arid wasteland. She thought of the flowers in her hair, the praise and then the dishonour. She shook her head.
“The wind is picking up,” she said pulling her black shawl against her face. “We need to go inside.”
They guided the horse and the llama up the temple steps and sat before the feet of a large headless idol. The walls around them were carved with images of frogs and slender trees.
“It’s a curious place, isn’t it?” Abelardo said. “I wouldn’t have expected such imagery.”
“There was an oasis here, once. It belonged to the water priestess. Their magic allowed beautiful gardens to blossom. Their magic is weaker now and the water doesn’t flow the same way it did, so they’ve gone to better grounds and let the desert salt have their stone palace.”
“I think I’ve seen one of their priestesses.”
Leocadia had been looking inside her leather bag for a piece of dried meat. She stopped when he spoke, glancing up at him.
“Rolan pointed her out when he was showing me town. White robes, isn’t it?”
“Yes.”
“A virginity cult of some sort, I’m given to understand.”
“Purity of thought is required to bring forth the rain,” Leocadia said, almost automatically.
She thought of the time when water had poured from her hands. How it ached, as though blood was being drained from her veins. And yet how wonderful it was, and how much praise was heaped on her.
“Water is a valuable commodity,” she said as she continued to rummage inside her bag, her shoulders tense. “So are the priestesses who bring it.”
“In Hellekierna they adore an alligator-god who sits upon a golden throne, and youths in golden robes feed it fish from silver dishes.”
Leocadia raised an eyebrow at him. He laughed.
“I swear it’s true,” he said and opened one of the drawers in his wooden box to reveal a little notebook. He flipped the pages and pointed at an illustration, all pretty pale watercolours. “See there.”
“You painted this?”
“Yes. I record everything I see. For maps, for the Empress.”
The eyes of the crocodile were golden and it had a great jewelled collar around its neck. It seemed heavy and cumbersome. Leocadia thought it might like to swim in a river better than padding through the throne room.
“It looks ferocious.”
“Oh, you haven’t seen anything. I went on the back of an elephant three years ago. It had tusks twice the size of a man. Here, see.”
“That’s odd-looking.”
“Just beyond the mountains that encircle your desert there are pink birds with the longest necks you’ve ever seen. They’re so pretty in flight.”
He flipped the page and Leocadia leaned over his shoulder. His hand brushed her arm, the slightest touch; a gesture with no great meaning. Yet Leocadia jumped to hear feet, as if startled.
“I’ll go look out,” she said clutching the shawl.
“I thought you said to wait inside.”
“You wait. I have to see what’s happening. We’ll have to head back to town soon.”
On the temple steps she held onto her lion and glanced at the windswept plain, the sun scorching the sky. Not a drop of moisture, nothing but the harsh wind, tossing salt in her face.
***
Her mother was stirring the stew like she did every day. However, there was a piercing silence in the kitchen. Rosaura sat in a corner with the baby in her arms. Even the child was quiet, no cooing coming from her.
Leocadia rested her shovel and pick against the wall.
“Rosaura says you’re running with some stranger.”
Leocadia did not answer. She nodded.
“I did not hear you,” her mother said, without looking at her.
“Yes,” Leocadia said finally.
“You have no shame.”
“He asked me for help.”
The slap did not take her by surprise. Leocadia merely bit her lips and went towards the little dinning room strewn with a few cushions, a low table and a rug. Rosaura followed her and placed the baby in a crib. Then she turned towards Leocadia.
“Don’t look at me like that,” Rosaura said. “Somebody else told her. I couldn’t lie.”
“What did you say?”
“You can’t go off with a man like that. Don’t you remember what happened with Rolan?”
“I didn’t do anything wrong,” she muttered.
“That’s not what it looks like.”
“It doesn’t matter.”
“It doesn’t matter? They’ll gossip.”
“Nothing they haven’t said before.”
Rosaura was upset. She pressed a hand against her chest. “If you don’t care about your reputation, think about us. How much more muck can you pour upon our family? Do you know what they call you in town?”
Leocadia did not want to discuss nicknames. She looked at the pattern of the rug, red and yellow and blue. Rosaura huffed at her.
“You want to live the rest of your life like a pariah? Keep it up. They’ll never forgive you.”
Leocadia went out of the house and stood in their backyard. There were piles of salt sitting there, like an eternal snowdrift. Leocadia grabbed a stick and drew an elephant, like in the pictures she had seen. She drew a monkey and an alligator and even a mermaid. Finally, she scrawled the cartographer’s name, the gesture of some love-sick child instead of a woman.
“Hello Leocadia,” said Bastian.
“Hello,” she said.
“I’ve come to take my wife back. Go tell her I’m here,” he said.
Leocadia did not move for a few moments. Finally, noticing the impatient look in his face, she rubbed off the letters in the salt and slowly walked back inside.
***
“I said I’m not going.”
“I can’t return alone.”
“Who cares? You already have your drawings and measurements and things,” she said.
“I’m not done yet. I need to go back today.”
“It’s not like you can’t find your way there,” she said.
“I’d like it if you accompanied me.”
Leocadia frowned and crossed her arms tight against her chest. She shouldn’t go. But he’d leave soon, taking all the pretty pictures and the nice smile away.
“We’ve got to come back quick,” she said. “And you’ll have to let me look at your other drawings.”
“Fine,” he said. “It’s a deal.”
Once inside the temple she spread his maps around her and looked at all the coasts, mountains and rivers. They surrounded her with their odd names and different topographies. She saw the white salt desert that was her land and Abelardo helped her find her home on it.
“There,” he said.
It was not even on the map. His finger fell over an empty space.
“Where are you from?” she asked.
“From far, far away. Across the other corner of the empire,” he said and shuffled through some papers until he found the right one. There he tapped against a little dot. “That’s me.”
“Where were you before Comba?”
“A meandering trajectory. A little haphazard,” he said pointing at another map and tracing a serpentine route over it. “Until I crossed the mountains on a whim and here I sit with you.”
Leocadia looked at the inked locations, traced the same path he had traced with his hands over the parchment. Then her hands flew up, over his face and across his cheeks, plotting a route of a different sort.
“I’m glad you did,” she said and kissed him, first on the cheek, then on the mouth.
He smiled at her and Leocadia painted a new map on his skin using her fingers.
***
Dusk was near. She could feel it. It was terribly late. Leocadia glanced at Abelardo, asleep near the statue’s feet, before grabbing her shawl and slipping outside. She stood barefoot on the steps of the temple, observing the sky and feeling the wind.
She ought to have been more concerned about her reception at home, the town, the words used to describe her. Instead she walked all the way down the steps and stood on the salt plain, enjoying the very blue skies. It would be perfect if it rained. She wanted to show him the desert when it turned into a great mirror. It was a stupid thought: Leocadia could not cast any more spells.
She brushed the hair from her face and wished for rain.
It was not like when she had been a young priestess and cast water spells. Those spells had been difficult, piercing stabs of power that prickled her skin and made her hands ache. She did not ache now, as she threw her head back and smiled at the sky.
There was a single drop of water. It hit her cheek.
Leocadia stared at the sky in wonder and watched clouds gathering in the horizon, rolling closer like the tide. Thunder boomed so loud she pressed her hands against her ears. Heavy rain fell and turned into a full-blown storm, water splattering against the ground, water flowing as freely as in the carvings inside the temple.
Leocadia laughed and clapped her hands. Lightning streaked the sky, following her pattern. Her legs were caked in salt up to their knees and the shawl had blown away, stolen by the wind.
By then Abelardo had woken up and was watching her from the temple. He went down the steps and met her in the salt plain where the clouds reflected on the water, and it was impossible to tell where the sky began or ended.
ABOUT THE AUTHOR
Mexican by birth, Canadian by inclination. Silvia lives in beautiful British Columbia with her family and two cats. She writes speculative fiction (from magic realism to horror). Her short stories have appeared in places such as
Shimmer
,
The Book of Cthulhu, Imaginarium 2013
:
The Best Canadian Speculative Writing
and
Shine: An Anthology of Optimistic Science Fiction
. Her first collection,
This Strange Way of Dying
, was released in 2013.
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