Sun God (5 page)

Terrified, Ramon nodded, lighted the lamps, and prepared himself for the longest night of his life. His fearless goddess did not share his dread. As if she were off on some lovely holiday, she smiled and hummed and tidied up the adobe.

At midnight she stripped off all her clothes, save for the golden Stone of the Sun. She leisurely bathed by candlelight. Naked, she climbed onto the clean, white bed, sat with her back propped against the pillows, drew her parted knees up, and placed her bare feet flat on the mattress.

When the tearing pains began to come regularly, she threw her arms up behind her, gripped the round cylinders of the heavy brass bedstead, and made not one sound.

While Don Ramon pressed cooling cloths to his wife’s pain-contorted face, her throat, her limp dark hair, Xochiquetzal calmly called on the ancient gods in the native Nahuatl tongue. Her frightened husband did not understand the language of the Aztecs, and more than once he wondered if she were offering up prayers in preparation for her death.

The toil of childbirth stretched on into the wee hours of the morning. Don Ramon was beside himself with worry. He watched the black eyes of his beloved dim with the intense pain, saw rivers of perspiration wash over her full breasts, her enormous belly, her long, spread legs.

The April sun came up and still Xochiquetzal sat upon her bed of agony, unable to expel the child within. Noon, and still she struggled, weak but unconquered. Feeling that God must surely be punishing him for some past forgotten sin, Don Ramon was certain that his wife and his unborn child were going to die.

The afternoon heat grew unbearable inside the close bedroom. Don Ramon’s damp shirt and trousers clung to his slim, hard body, perspiration dripped from his thick hair into his green eyes. He stayed on at her bedside, loving the suffering woman more than he loved his own life, silently vowing that when she drew her last painful breath, he would join her in death. Her eyes already were closing. The hour was close at hand.

The sun had begun its slide toward the western horizon. The hot, dry air began to cool. Xochiquetzal’s black eyes opened. To her husband’s shock, she smiled at him. Her face was suddenly serene. The light from the setting sun turned her bare, gleaming body a pale orange hue.

Pushing with the last ounce of strength in her pain-weakened body, she said triumphantly, “The time is now.”

And so it was.

Tonatiuh was born just as the sun said good-bye to earth. While the healthy infant squalled out his rude introduction to the world, his tired, happy mother fell into instant sleep, and his relieved father cried unashamedly with joy and thanksgiving.

When the baby was but four months old, Don Ramon came home one sweltering August noon to find both wife and child missing. He rode straight to Walter Sullivan’s place, supposing that his goddess had grown lonely and was visiting the two Sullivan women.

But a Mexican servant met him at the door and told him that
Señora
Sullivan had just learned she was to have a baby in the spring. The
señora
and the
señorita
had left that morning. They had gone to New Orleans. They would remain there until the baby came.

Don Ramon turned away. Frantic, he went in search of his wife and child, riding across dry washes and cactus-dotted plateaus and baked desert flats.

It was sundown when he saw something glittering brilliantly atop a basalt mesa. He anxiously spurred his winded mount up the rough tableland.

Tonatiuh, squalling his head off, sunburned and hungry, lay atop the barren mesa. He was naked. Fastened around his neck was the heavy gold chain. Atop his bare belly lay the gold Sun Stone. Beneath his dark head was a sheet of folded, strange-looking paper.

Ramon picked up his unhappy son, cradled him in one bent arm, and lifted the paper. A fine tissuelike paper, made from the bark of a fig tree, Ramon recognized it as the kind used by the Aztecs more than five hundred years before.

Slowly, carefully, he unfolded the fine paper and began to read.

Ramon

“Ramon.”

“What?” Don Ramon blinked in surprise, then smiled. “I am sorry,” he said, rising. “I … my mind was in the past.”

Walter Sullivan grinned at him from the doorway. “A nice place to visit, but we can’t live there,
amigo.
Come, the regulars are in the card room.”

I
T WAS SAID THAT
Pedrico could see more with one eye than most people could with two.

The one-eyed Pedrico Valdez had been an Orilla houseboy since before Amy was born. She’d heard whispers from the servants of how the quiet, slender man had lost his left eye.

When he was little more than a boy and living alone in Paso del Norte, he had become bewitched by a pretty cantina singer. All his money went to buy presents for the red-lipped, dark-eyed woman. He wanted to marry the lovely Angelica, his angel. She laughed and kissed him and promised to say yes just as soon as he turned twenty.

But, alas, his Angelica was no angel, and one hot moonlit night a handsome stranger rode into the border town, walked into the cantina, and stole Angelica’s fickle heart.

Angelica’s jealous boy lover, Pedrico, challenged the love thief. A fight ensued. The stranger pulled a knife. Pedrico was unarmed. He lost his eye and his love and was left for dead in an alley.

Walter Sullivan found him, took him to a doctor, then brought him out to Orilla to recuperate. Pedrico had been there ever since. The eye he had kept had never again settled on a woman, although more than one pretty Orilla housemaid had found the slender man with the black eye-patch and quiet manner appealing.

His wounded heart still belonged to Angelica.

His fierce loyalty belonged to the
patrón.

Now, on this warm June morning, Pedrico, a linen-draped breakfast tray balanced atop his spread fingers, knocked gently on Amy’s closed bedroom door. He spoke the magic words he knew she was longing to hear. “
Señorita
Amy, wake up. All the guests have gone.”

He waited, his lips lifted in a smile beneath a thin black mustache.

In seconds the heavy carved door flew open and a sleepy-eyed young girl blinked at him. “Are you sure, Pedrico?”

Nodding, he stepped past her into the bedroom. After placing the tray on a polished drum table at the room’s center, he marched over and drew the heavy drapery, allowing bright morning sunshine to flood the room.

“Senator and Mrs. Calahan departed at sunrise,” he announced with a smile. “There are no longer any visitors at Orilla.”

“Thank the good Lord,” said Amy, tying the satin ribbons at the throat of her robe and climbing atop the rumpled bed where she sat cross-legged. “Finally some time to myself!”

Pedrico, pouring coffee from a gleaming silver server, nodded and said, “Does this mean you do not wish to be disturbed?” He crossed to her, a fragile cup of steaming black coffee in his white gloved hand.

“It most certainly does,” she said, reaching for the coffee. Sensing something and catching a definite twinkle in his eye, she asked, “What’s going on here? There’s something you’re not telling me.”

Pedrico grinned. “An impatient young man awaits downstairs, but if you’d rather not …” He shrugged.

“Who?”

“Luiz Quintano.”

Amy shoved the coffee cup back at him. “Tonatiuh is here? Now?” Her eyes gone wide with excitement, she bounded off the bed. “Pedrico, you devil! Why didn’t you say so!”

“I am saying so now,
Señorita
Amy. Luiz has come to see if you might wish to go for a ride this morning. What shall I tell him?”

“You tell him yes!” she said, her quick mind racing ahead, choosing what she would wear, settling on a beautiful pale-yellow chamois riding skirt, split up the middle, and an expensive, never-before-worn yellow silk blouse. She
had
to look her best. “Of course I want to go riding with Tonatiuh.”

“I thought so,” said Pedrico, winking his one eye at her. “He is waiting on the east patio.”

Luiz Quintano nervously paced the wide stone-floored patio, his palms perspiring, his stomach tied in knots. He had risen with the sun, so anxious for a chance to see Amy alone he had been unable to sleep.

Before going to bed, he had carefully laid out the clothes he would wear today, choosing what he hoped made him look older, more like a man. But when he had dressed at dawn, somehow he had looked all wrong, foolish.

In disgust, he had changed. Then changed again. When his big, dark-paneled bedroom was littered with discarded clothes, he had finally put back on the very ones he had so carefully laid out the night before.

Now, jittery, doubtful, he wished he had worn something less conspicuous. He should have thrown on a pair of worn buckskins and an old shirt. Now Amy would think he was vain. Or worse, believe he was trying to show off for her benefit. That is, if she came down at all. Which she might not.

She might simply laugh and tell Pedrico that the last thing on earth she wanted to do was to go riding with a boring seventeen-year-old Indian.

Luiz gritted his even white teeth.

Before his eyes rose the hated visions: Amy swallowed up in the suave Tyler Parnell’s arms, spinning dizzily about on the dance floor. Amy laughing and tossing her blond head as Parnell whispered in her ear. Amy, on Parnell’s arm, sweeping right past him and out into the moonlit gardens.

Luiz’s dark eyes closed in frustration.

Amy Sullivan wouldn’t come downstairs to go riding with him this morning! He was a pitiful fool to have come here thinking she would. He was making a spectacle of himself. And everyone would know. Pedrico would tell all the others. He would become an object of ridicule at Orilla.

His eyes flicked open.

He couldn’t let that happen. He
wouldn’t
let it happen. Anxious to be gone from the scene of his impending shame, Luiz whirled about and strode hurriedly across the stone patio toward the tall, dense hedge at its edge.

Emitting a sigh of relief when he had disappeared through the opening in the tall hedge, he had gone only a few steps when he heard her calling his name.

“Tonatiuh, I’m sorry I’m so late, but I—” Amy, stepping out onto the patio, stopped and looked about, puzzled. “Tonatiuh?”

A movement at the back hedge drew her attention. She looked up as Luiz stepped into the opening in the dense green shrubbery. Framed by the tall hedge, he stood, unmoving, feet apart, looking directly at her. Speechless, she stared back at him.

He wore a long-sleeved shirt of sky-blue cotton and dark-brown trousers that covered all but the toes of his polished cowboy boots. Rows of silver buttons ran up the side seams of the tight pants, and around his slim waist was an elaborately intaglioed western belt. On his hands were gloves of soft velvety chamois and at his throat was a bandanna of a deep chocolate hue.

Blue-black hair glinting in the sunlight, jet eyes locked on her, he quietly said her name.

Amy.

Nothing more. Not good morning, Amy. Not it’s nice to see you. Only Amy. But the way he said it filled her with the same strange excitement she’d felt the day he met her train.

He started toward her and Amy felt her knees turn to water. He approached her, the clanking of his big roweled Mexican spurs in rhythm with her quickening heartbeat. When he stood directly before her, she caught the flicker of doubt in the depths of his beautiful black eyes.

“I … I … thought you might like to go for a ride,” he said, a tiny muscle jerking involuntarily at the corner of his mouth. “But if you don’t, why, I can …”

“Please,” she broke in, lifting her hand, longing to touch him, not daring to do so. “Take me. I want to ride with you, Tonatiuh.”

He smiled then. It was a smile so unexpected, so warm and dazzling that she caught her breath. She blinked happily when his gloved fingers took hold of her upper arm and he quickly ushered her across the patio toward the opening in the hedge.

“I saddled a couple of horses,” he said, still smiling broadly, then added, “just in case.”

Amy smiled too, and looking up at his bronzed face, she wondered how he could have possibly doubted that she would want to go riding with him. But she said nothing. Happy, excited, she allowed the tall lanky young man to hurry her across the rolling back lawn and out the gate to where a couple of mounts stood saddled and waiting.

“I chose the black mare for you, but if you’d rather have the—”

“I want her,” Amy said, her appreciative eyes on a shimmering black with white stocking feet and a white star on her face. “She’s beautiful, Tonatiuh.”

He beamed with pride and pleasure. He placed his hands on Amy’s waist to lift her up into the silver-trimmed, black leather saddle. He looped the long reins over the black’s neck and handed them to her. When she was astride the mare he stood smiling up at Amy, his gloved hand idly toying with the stirrup.

“Think you remember how to ride?” he teased, feeling lighthearted for the first time in a week.

“Catch me if you can” was Amy’s challenging answer. She wheeled the responsive black around, touched her spurless bootheels to its flanks, and the mare shot away.

Luiz stood there for a moment, watching the beautiful girl ride away from him, her wild golden hair streaming out behind her, the sound of her laughter filling him with a new kind of happiness that was so wonderful it scared him.

Grabbing up the reins of a huge iron-gray stallion, Luiz swung up into the saddle, touched his spurs to the big beast, and raced swiftly after the laughing gilt-haired girl.

The gray stallion easily overtook the black mare. An expert horseman, Luiz had been placed in the saddle alone by the time he was two. Since the age of twelve he had been training fine Orilla horses, and the
patrón
said he was the most accomplished
jinete
on the ranch. Luiz took great pride in his position and was pleased that the older, more experienced Orilla horsemen embraced him as their equal.

Moving up alongside Amy, Luiz reined in, slowing his iron gray to the smaller black’s easy gait. He shot Amy a smile, then wordlessly the pair rode knee to knee away from the Orilla’s many adobe buildings. Across the sandy soil they loped, heading northeast to where the ground sloped gently upward.