by Tom DeMarco
Chlotide laughed, heedless of the tears, now running down her cheeks again. Then she pulled Loren to her and kissed him again. She had a stethoscope tucked into the front of her smock; Edward had learned earlier that she was a doctor.
Loren found his voice at last. “This is my great friend, Eduardo,” he said “Eduardo Barodin, Chlotide Martine.”
“Oh, a great friend. Well in that case…” She offered her lips to Edward who bent down to kiss them, looking into her laughing eyes as he did.
“He is very good looking, your Eduardo. Shall marry him off to one of our sisters…?Ooops, he’s not married, is he?”
“No. Which sister shall we pick for him? Perhaps Celuza?”
“Celuza has a beau.”
There were still children all around them. Chlotide grabbed two young boys, and tousled their hair. Without a by-your-leave, she loaded them up with the luggage. “Keep your eyes on these two,” she said over her shoulder to Loren and Edward in Spanish. “They are Diaz boys, and a pair of rascals. Your bags will probably end up in the river.” Then she took Loren by one arm and Edward by the other and led them down toward the mill.
Within a few moments, Edward had met Sierpa and her husband Alberto and their two boys. At lunch an hour later, he met Asunción and the babies of the family, Ana-Lucia and Sanchy, now 14 and 17 years old. Before dinner there was a gathering on the terrace over the river where they drank vino tinto and ate tapas, and there Edward met Celuza and her boyfriend Juan. He was trying to keep track; so far he had met six of Loren’s seven sisters. Then, just before sitting down for dinner, he was introduced to Maria del Sol, and in that moment something happened that he had thought might never happen again: He began to fall in love.
Maria del Sol was the tallest of the Martine girls, the tallest in fact of the whole Martine family. She stood tall enough to look Edward nearly square in the eye, which she did, appraisingly. She didn’t say a thing, at the time, but her sisters knew what she was thinking. Loren, of course, missed it all.
She was twenty-nine, a year older than Loren. She had taken her advanced degree from Salamanca in anthropology and was now a professor of the subject. But where that science is concerned mostly with man, MariSol’s interest was more the birds and animals, man’s neighbors on this earth. She was a naturalist. When she was not teaching or counseling students at the university and not involved with the family, she spent her time in the hills, tracking and observing and drawing every living thing she could find. Her drawings were a wonder: fine line pencil sketches made in the field and then washed later with colored inks. She had had a book of her illustrations published by the university with her commentary on the hills and their creatures.
“I will take you hunting in the late afternoon, when I get back,” she said to Edward on the second morning. “We will be terribly late for supper. Do you like to hunt?”
“I think I will like it if you set your mind to make me like it.”
“I have. We will hunt without weapons, just our hands.”
“Oh.”
In the hills that afternoon she set down the rules of hunting with the bare hands: “Our prey is the hawk that kills the little prairie dogs. I am very fond of the prairie dogs, more so than of the hawks. This is unfair, I know, but there you have it. So we hunt the hawks.”
“With our bare hands.”
“Nothing but our hands. I will show you.”
They had to approach the prairie dog burrows on their stomachs, moving very slowly and without noise. Edward found himself observing a female with two little ones at a distance of only a dozen yards, closer than he had ever been before to a truly wild animal. He was fascinated to see the mother grooming her young. The scene was so gentle that he understood why Maria del Sol had chosen sides as she had. He looked over toward her. She gestured upward with her eyes. Very slowly, Edward lifted his head to see what was there, a brownish colored hawk, circling just above the three little animals. “I will show you,” MariSol mouthed the words. The hawk was about the size of a small eagle, and it looked determined and nasty. Edward was suddenly apprehensive. The bird had definitely sighted its supper.
The hawk wheeled and dropped, gaining speed on a power glide. When he was nearly upon them, Maria del Sol leapt to her feet, held her hand out like a pistol and shouted “Bof! Bof! Bof!” Then she fell back in the dust, giggling as the hawk flew off with a screech.
Edward was standing over her, his face white. It took him a moment to realize he had been had. “That is what you mean by hunting with your hands?”
“Yes,” she laughed, “what did you think?”
“I can’t imagine.”
They continued walking through the afternoon, further up into the hills until the sun was low in the sky. Even when it was almost ready to set, they did not turn back immediately. She said this was a particularly interesting time to observe. He followed her along a narrow ravine, down to a little green meadow by the side of a brook. They stopped just short of the meadow in some low scrub. “Now be terribly quiet for a long time,” she said. She turned over on her back and looked up at the hills in the distance, frosted with the beginnings of the sunset. Her eyes were a bit unfocused. Edward stared off at the brook where he supposed some animal would eventually turn up to drink. When he looked back at Maria del Sol, her eyes were closed. Her face was reposed enough for her to have been asleep, but he thought she was not. Now he wished he had brought a sketchbook and pencil of his own, not to draw the wildlife but to draw the woman in front of him. She had high cheekbones, almost like an American Indian, and long auburn hair, heavy with red, almost purple, tones. Her hands, now folded on her chest, had the longest fingers. He thought, it was those hands he would have tried to sketch first. Her lashes fell down onto her cheeks, lay flat upon them, dark auburn against the light tan of her skin. There was something astonishing about her cheeks, something that had eluded him for most of the day, but now that he could observe her quietly, he saw that it was the absence of any darkness or circle beneath the eye, as though she slept soundly, deeply the whole night through, every single night and awoke utterly refreshed. There was not one bit of tension in her face. She was as peaceful, he thought, as any human he had ever seen.
There must have been a sound. He heard nothing, but MariSol’s eyes were suddenly open. She did not look toward the brook at all, but rolled directly over to his side and spoke softly in his ear in Spanish, “Look now down near the water, at the foot of the dead tree.”
Edward raised his eyes, looking for something, but mostly conscious of the warmth of her breath in his ear. At the water’s edge, he could make out an animal as large as a small terrier, but heavily furred and built low to the ground. After drinking, it sat up on its rear legs to look around. He could see it quite clearly, black with a white stripe running up from the squarish snout, between the ears and down the whole length of its back. It was something he had never seen before.
“Un tejón,” she said, “in English, a badger.”
They watched the badger until it finally lumbered off. Maria del Sol said it was a male, about five years old.
The long twilight gave them a little more time. She took him back up the ravine and higher to a stand of pines on a flat stretch, tucked into the side of a hill. Something caught her eye there and she motioned for him to approach quietly. She reached out for a heavy green bough and lifted it gently aside. Underneath was a baby hare. It looked up at them half afraid and half trusting. She lowered the bough and took Edward’s hand to guide him further on. They broke out from the pine onto a flat ledge that gave a view down over the Tormes and the village of Alba. There was just enough room for two to sit there. She held on to him until he was seated securely. Beneath their feet, the bluff dropped off a hundred feet or more.
Edward could feel her warmth where they were touching all along his left side, shoulder, arm, hip and leg. She turned to him with a little smile, not saying anything. Her eyes were clear, the irises almost black.
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br /> “Do you know what this night is?” he asked her.
“Oh, yes. It is why I feel so foolish and wonderful.”
“The 21st of June. Midsummer Night.”
“Yes.”
He reached up into the rock face behind her head where there was a bit of moss with a tiny flower at its center. He plucked the little blossom, no bigger than the head of a match, a brilliant blue.
“May I give you this tiny gift, Mary Sunshine? For Midsummer?”
“Yes. Thank you.” She accepted the flower very somberly. “I will keep it near my heart.” She placed it on the end of her tongue and swallowed. “Fairly near.”
“This is my first Midsummer Night,” he told her, “because I can’t remember any of the others and this one I won’t forget.”
She looked out over the valley, smiling slightly. After a moment, she linked her arm through his. “My tiny gift for you on this Midsummer Night, Edward, is a kiss.” She leaned toward him. As he kissed her, she looked back directly into his eyes, but partway through, her lids began to fall sensually as though a soft infusion of pleasure were passing through her body.
“Now we must run,” she said. “Because even on Midsummer Eve it does eventually get dark, and we have a long way to go.
They ran the whole distance down the hill and carried on into the village, hand in hand.
Each night at dinner there was a song. For Asunción, music was the principal complement needed to the public school education. She said the schools would turn out students who were language and science and math literate, but musical ignoramuses. So she led them singing each evening in close harmony, as many parts as there were voices. Even Edward had to sing. She was a hard taskmaster.
There was one song, a love song, in which Celuza sang the part of the girl and the chorus was her lover. Celuza’s voice was the highest and purest of them all. She stood for her part. As she sang, Juan Navarro gazed up at her, his eyes melting. His love was so obvious that at the end, Sanchy leaned her head toward him and said, wickedly:
“Resistance, young man! If you give in, you shall have to face the Trial by Fire.” After she said it she joined in the laughter with the rest of the family.
Only Juan and Edward were left out of the laughing. Juan was blushing deep red, and Edward was just confused. “You’ll have to explain that one to me,” he said to Asunción.
“Oh, yes. I think you need to know,” she said. It wasn’t clear to Edward why that should have added to the mirth, but it seemed to. Sanchy and Ana-Lucia, in particular were having difficulty containing themselves. “In the region of Salamanca,” Asunción continued, “there is a law about marriages. The law says that no man can be married without first receiving a thorough physical examination from the town or village doctor. It is a very thorough exam.”
Juan was blushing even more if possible, and Edward was still confused. “But that seems fairly reasonable…”
“Yes, reasonable indeed. But we call it the Trial by Fire in Alba, because the physician of Alba is none other than Dr. Chlotide Martine.”
“Oh.”
“Marrying one of our girls, you see,” said Chlotide, “is not something you enter into lightly at all. Because the physician of Alba takes her work so seriously.” She was grinning and looking directly at Juan. “That exam is the Trial by Fire.”
Edward joined uneasily into the laughter, suspecting that he may be blushing a bit himself.
Most evenings they stayed at the table after the meal for story-telling, finally getting up only when someone seemed ready to go to sleep at his or her place. The stories the family wanted to hear most were about Victoria. The lore of the new nation in the Caribbean—and particularly of her princess—had begun to work on all of the young women of Loren’s family.
When all the stories were told that Loren and Edward could think of, the girls prompted them to retell the best ones. “Tell us again, Lorentino, about the princess leaping over the decks with a sword,” Sanchy would beg. And Loren would relate again the story of the battle of the Bahama Channel, and Kelly, covered with blood, struggling to push the evil gas canister over the side. When he finished, he looked around the table to see all of his seven sisters with distant expressions, each seeming to see herself with a machete in her hand and an evil figure looming over her.
“Is she just terribly lovely, the Princess?” Ana-Lucia asked, her eyes wide, ready to believe any excess.
“She is probably the most beautiful woman in all of history,” Edward said, “Or perhaps even more beautiful than that.” He looked directly at Ana-Lucia as he said it.
“Hombre!” she said.
Loren thought this might be a good time to introduce one of the purposes of his visit. “The Princess is particularly eager to get to know her new sisters. She asked me if I would bring one of you back with me, at least for a visit.” A shrill chorus of offers erupted from the table.
“Well, you will all get to come one day, of course, to visit,” he laughed. “But I thought the first might be one who would like to stay in Victoria and become the Princess’s special friend.”
Chlotide was seated at Loren’s side. She put her hand on his arm, and said, suddenly serious, “I can have an intern here to take my practice as of the morning. Choose me, Loren.”
“Oh, I think you are much too essential to take away,” he replied. He said it lightly. Chlotide withdrew her hand, flinching as though she had been punched. There was a long silence in which no one could think of anything to say. At last Loren picked up weakly: “Each of you will come some day,” he said.
In the end, it was Maria del Sol who returned with the Ardent to Victoria. Edward received a stern instruction from Asunción:
“You must bring her back to us often, Edward. And take very good care of her in between.”
12
INCIDENT AT REDSTONE
The Ardent was on her mooring over the La Sabana airship yards. Loren had been on board since the afternoon of the previous day. Their departure was scheduled for just after dawn. Through the open window beside his bed, he stared down in annoyance at the ground below. It was already light enough to see clearly. If it had been his choice, the Ardent would have been up at the level where Superb was stationed now, a distant spot in the sky above them. At that level there were cool breezes and a man could get some sleep. The heat of the August night made sleep impossible at this altitude.
But it had not been his choice where the airship should lie during her wait. Since the previous morning, Commander Myer had been in charge of the Ardent. At that time, Loren had assumed command of the squadron consisting of Ardent, Superb and the old Dreadnought. He would serve as commodore of the mission, and thus, by the Proctor’s convention, could not also be Captain of his own flagship. Of course he was still the superior officer; he could have waked Myer up hours ago and ordered him to take up position a few thousand feet higher, but that would have been interfering. Loren was determined not to interfere. He was equally determined that the crew think of him as sleeping peacefully through the night, of being impervious to heat, and impervious to the excitement of the mission. But the fact was that he hadn’t slept at all.
Why was it that the suggestion of danger, of death and destruction, made him feel so alive? The squadron would be sailing into the middle of an enemy bastion, intent on destroying lives and property. By what right did they do this? Victoria had for the moment an upper hand in her struggle with the mainland. She would flex her might and leave ruin behind. Was it so different from the actions that Rupert Paule and his minions had taken years earlier to destroy revolutionary Cuba? The magnitude of the act, of course, the sheer numbers of expected dead would be less. But what was the difference beyond that? How could he be outraged at the mindlessness of Rupert Paule’s Cuba Libre attack, and yet be contemplating calmly, flat on his back, dressed in his silk pajamas, the actions of the coming days? There were people who were alive and happy this morning, who would be dead before the week was up.
The demise of those innocent victims should have been the only thing on his mind. But he had to remind himself to include their deaths in his thinking at all. What he did not have to remind himself of was the pleasure of the coming engagement. His heartbeat could begin to accelerate just at the thought of turning the new weapons on an enemy target.
Loren turned over, turned his back on the open window. Then he rolled completely about to face it again. Finally he gave it up for a loss and sat up in his bed. He threw the covers aside and padded in his bare feet out into the main room of his cabin suite. There was a cocktail table there with a pair of couches and two easy chairs around it. On the table were large format books of paintings and one of photographs of old Cuba and a silver tray with a decanter of sherry and clean glasses. There were paintings hung from the white cabin walls. He might have been in the living room of an elegant Manhattan flat. Only that appearance was deceiving; this was the stern cabin of a warship about to go into battle.
There was the familiar shudder of sails being unfurled into the wind, and a moment later he felt the motion of Ardent gathering way. As she came close to the elevated gates of the terminal building, Loren stepped into his dressing room to put on a uniform. It wouldn’t do at all to be seen in his PJs by whoever might be beside the terminal windows. A few minutes later, he took his position beside Myer and Lt. Bentenyev at the main saloon entry as the Ardent docked.
The crew members were strung out in a long line, from the terminal, looking like nothing so much as passengers stacked up on a loading ramp, waiting to get onto a 747 in another era. Commander Myer welcomed each one by name. It was a ceremony that Loren had performed often and didn’t think too much about, but it was a relatively new experience for Myer. Loren watched with a critical eye. The man was a good dozen years his senior, and that made Loren more critical still. He found it galling that Victoria’s air navy was growing so quickly that Myer would have his own ship shortly, whether he was brilliant or just barely competent. And then Rita Bentenyev would be elevated to second in command and then soon after, made a captain herself, and replaced on the Ardent by one of the present class of midshipmen, who by that time would have been advanced several times in rank. It was all happening too fast. The navy was over-extended. The officers and crews were cocky, but barely functional. And still there was the constant pressure to grow faster and faster.
