Days of the Dead

by Barbara Hambly

  Hannibal edged away from the well’s rim and tried to raise himself onto one elbow. “According to the Iliad, one can go mad just as convincingly by slaughtering sheep.”

  Don Anastasio reached down, dragged Hannibal to his feet by the front of his shirt, then tore the garment back over his shoulders and shoved him into the grip of the two bandits, who had managed, in near-record time, to finish the liquor in the flask. “The British minister,” said the Don, picking up the obsidian knife, “would make less of a fuss over sheep. Probably not much less, but some.”

  At a nod from him, Lobo kicked Hannibal behind the knees, thrust him down onto the stone altar. The fiddler kicked and twisted, but the two bandits pinned him by ankles and shoulders exactly as the priests did in the ancient carvings on the walls. Don Anastasio started forward. . . .

  “ANASTASIO DE SARAGOSSE!” January bellowed at the top of his lungs, not knowing how the speaking-tube might magnify his voice, and was rewarded beyond all expectations by thunderous echoes that seemed to come from everywhere in the darkness at once. Don Anastasio might not believe in the ancient gods, but he was startled enough by the sound alone to jerk back and drop the knife, and his two henchmen leaped away from the altar as if they’d been shot at.

  Swift as a lizard, Hannibal rolled off the altar and bolted for the door, and January saw nothing of the proceedings for the next second or so as he slithered through the narrow passage to the sanctuary, pistol in hand. He writhed clear of its entrance in time to see Lobo catch Hannibal by the arm and fling him back in the direction of the altar. Hannibal collided with José, tripped on one of the lanterns, sending it plunging down into the dark of the holy well and falling himself on its edge. For an instant he lay gasping on the brink of the chasm, struggling to twist his hands free of their bonds. José strode over to him and he tried to roll aside, and before January could reach them or even move in that direction, with spiteful deliberation José kicked Hannibal over the edge.

  A gunshot cracked in the same instant and José sprawled back into a corner. Rose ducked out of the doorway as Lobo raised his own pistol—January seized his wrist, hearing the bone in the arm snap as he flung the bearded bandit aside. In the doorway Rose cried out, “Ben!”

  And turning, January saw Anastasio backed against the carved jamb of the outer door. He held Rose by one arm twisted behind her, the sacrificial knife at her throat.

  January froze.

  “Throw down your gun,” said the Don quietly. “I have no desire to harm either of you. If you leave at once, tonight, for Vera Cruz, I shall see to it that your wife rejoins you there safely within a week. Thanks to her, I have a dead man, and a dead man is all I really need tonight; it scarcely matters who. I don’t think anyone will believe a pair of negros any more than they’d have believed your worthless friend.”

  January stood a few feet from the edge of the cenote, his breath dragging hard. José, his chest blown to bloody rags, was still twitching and gurgling near the unconscious Don Prospero. His blood had splattered the far wall, dripping down the brown skeletal face of Mictlantecuhtli and the gaudy marigolds. Lobo crouched, moaning with pain, in a corner. The crowded darkness was filled with the stink of blood and voided waste.

  “Any more than I believe you,” January said.

  “It scarcely matters whether you believe me or not,” replied Don Anastasio in his soft, reasonable voice. “I assure you that what I am doing is for the best.”

  “And I suppose you’re going to kill him, too?” January nodded at Lobo.

  Anastasio shook his head impatiently. “What does he matter? I have killed him already. You don’t think I’d trust men like that to run about wagging their tongues in every pulqueria in the Valley of Mexico, do you? I repeat, there is no one here now who can hurt me. Leave now, and no harm will come to your wife.” He pressed the blade to her throat. “Interfere with me . . .”

  “Without her as a hostage you’re a dead man.”

  “That won’t bring her back, now, will it?” Drawing Rose after him, Anastasio backed along the passageway. January followed him slowly outside, wondering desperately what he was going to do, what he could do. He dared not rush him, dared not risk his own reflexes—or Rose’s—against those of the wiry, quick-moving Don. Yet he knew as surely as he knew his name that the man who had calmly handed those two poor bandits a flask of poisoned liquor—who had calculated the most worthless available victim whose death would oblige Santa Anna to have Don Prospero locked up—would never let Rose go free.

  And if Anastasio was paying El Moro and his bandits, he himself might never reach Vera Cruz either.

  Moonlight blazed on the steep slope of the pyramid outside. January saw horses tied at the bottom. He felt hypnotized by the sight of that black glass blade, after five hundred years still sharper than steel, pressed into Rose’s skin. “Go down the pyramid ahead of me,” said Anastasio quietly. “Take one of the horses and go. I swear to you she will come to no harm as long as you keep silent about what you have seen here tonight. This is purely a family matter. . . .”

  “Are you counting Guillenormand as family? Or Hannibal? Or Werther Bremer?” But even as he said the words, January guessed that Don Anastasio didn’t even comprehend his objection.

  A servant? An opium-eater? A catamite?

  Nothing.

  No more than a woman of color, a woman of no family . . .

  “I repeat,” said Anastasio, “you really have no choice. Unless you . . .”

  The rifle that cracked almost in January’s ear made him leap aside, his heart nearly springing out of his body with shock. So silently had Don Prospero emerged from the tunnel behind him that January didn’t even see the old hacendado until he fired. It was an astonishing shot for moonlight: Don Anastasio’s head snapped back and his arms flew out, Rose ducking, springing aside from the falling body. For a half-second all January could see was Rose, stumbling to her knees and catching herself, still moving, still alive. . . .

  Then he looked back and saw Anastasio reel backwards and tumble down the pyramid in a spatter of blood to the bottom, as the sacrificed victims had long ago rolled.

  Beside January, Don Prospero stepped forward to watch him roll with interested eyes, leaning on the rifle while smoke curled from the barrel, white as the old man’s hair in the moonlight.

  Only when the body came to rest did the old Don turn to January, his pale gaze quizzical under those jutting, animal brows.

  “It’s a most extraordinary thing,” he remarked. “Fernando says Anastasio killed him.”

  Rose got slowly to her feet, brushing dirt from her hands and, almost as an afterthought, wiping the thin streak of blood from her neck. “What?”

  January ran down the slope to her, caught her in his arms, trembling with shock. The black glass knife lay where Anastasio had dropped it, in the dust at her feet. She shook her head a little—I’m all right—and laid her hand against his cheek; he felt dizzy for a moment, as if he was going to faint.

  Hannibal, he thought then, Hannibal falling into the pit in the temple. . . .

  He scrambled back to where the Don stood, gently took the rifle from him, though having been fired, it was no danger now and Prospero showed no signs of re-loading it.

  “Fernando told you?”

  “Just now.” The Don blinked at him, puzzled but not upset. “Back in the . . . Are we at the pyramid? How did we get here?”

  He shook his head. In the bluish moonlight his face was empty of ferocity, relaxed, like that of a sleepy child. “The last I recall I was having a drink with Anastasio. Then I woke up, and Fernando told me Anastasio had murdered him—something about peanuts, though how peanuts could harm anyone . . . And he said to kill him.”

  The old man sighed, stroked his long mustaches into tidy order, and slowly descended the pyramid to where Anastasio’s crumpled body lay. “It really is too bad,” January heard him say without a backward glance. “He did raise astonishingly good pears.”

&n
bsp; TWENTY-FIVE

  “Hannibal?”

  The surviving lantern had been kicked into a corner of the temple and was guttering out. Kneeling on the edge of the holy well, January could see the tiniest smudge of yellow gleam reflected on rocks just below the narrow ledge, as if the lantern had rolled into some nook or cave beneath it. Even as he watched, it flickered out; his own torchlight showed him that Hannibal had not, as he’d prayed, fallen onto the ledge. But a moment later a faint, husky voice whispered, “Darkling I listen, amicus meus— Is Rose all right? I thought I heard her voice. . . .”

  “She’s fine.” Barely, January added to himself, shivering again. He was beginning to understand those men who went mad and locked their wives up to make sure nothing ever happened to them.

  Like Don Prospero.

  “Are you all right? Where are you?”

  “Under the ledge—the ground slopes pretty sharply once you hit. Fallen from his high estate, and welt’ring in his blood. . . . Only I don’t seem to be weltering much, thank goodness, though I won’t answer for my right leg.” A dry whisper as weight shifted tentatively on stones, and the sudden harsh draw of breath that told January his friend was far from unscathed by his fall.

  “Was that you who spoke to Don Prospero?”

  “Me? Not a word. I’ve been lying here, pretending to be a virgin. I heard him say Fernando’s name once, but that was all. Is the shooting done?”

  “I think so. I have to go back to the bottom for a rope.”

  “Be thou here again ere the leviathan can swim a league, if you can manage it, amicus meus. There’s something down here—I don’t know whether it’s a scorpion or a spider, but it’s walked across me twice.”

  “I’ll put a girdle round the earth in forty minutes,” promised January, breathless with relief at being involved again in one of Hannibal’s ridiculous conversations, and strode out through the dark of the tunnel to the moonlit hill-slope beyond.

  Rose was sitting on the domed head of a half-buried stone serpent at the bottom of the pyramid, her rifle across her knees. Don Prospero lay asleep on the ground near-by. She had dragged Anastasio’s body straight and covered it with a ragged blanket. “I’ve had to chase away coyotes twice,” she said when January came down the slope to search the saddles for rope. “We have to get him out of here soon. Is Hannibal all right?”

  “Alive and quoting Shakespeare,” reported January as he untied the rope and slung it over his shoulder.

  “And Anastasio’s henchmen? How many of them were there? It seemed like about a dozen. . . .”

  “Two,” said January. “One’s dead. The other’s poisoned—I’ll have to do for him what I can, but I don’t know as there’s anything I can do. We’ll have to get him back to town somehow. . . .” He found another small lantern tied to one of the saddles, lit the stub of tallow candle within it.

  “So the police can hang him?”

  January only shook his head. When he reached the temple again he found the bandit Lobo still twitching spasmodically, surrounded by puddles of vomit. The whole temple reeked of death.

  I have killed them, Anastasio had said.

  Killed them with the cold-blooded efficiency that regarded bandits and opium-eaters in the light of sacrificial animals, to be disposed of as stepping-stones to some larger scheme. Along with cooks and catamites, presumably, and the scum of the jails drafted into the Army to fight in Texas. January knelt beside Lobo and peered into his eyes, then covered him with the coat Don Anastasio had taken off, though he knew it would do little good. He had no equipment here to force whatever residue there was out of the man’s stomach, nothing he could do except build a small fire with brush and sticks, in the hope of keeping him warm. The flaring yellow light of brush hastily pulled outside twisted over Mictlantecuhtli’s grinning face as January anchored a loop of rope around the broken block of the blood-spattered altar, making him seem about to speak.

  “Dear gods, I don’t think I’ve ever been so happy in my life to hear anything as when you shouted.” The jerking whisper of the lantern-light was just barely enough to show January the white blur of Hannibal’s shirt below, and the pale shape of his face. He lay, as he’d said, in a niche beneath the ledge where the rubble of the floor had subsided sharply, like a farther pit of Hell beneath the first drop. There was no sign of the lantern. “Then, and a few minutes ago when I realized that you’d survived the shooting and that I wasn’t going to be left down here to die of thirst. . . . Where’s Don Prospero?”

  “Asleep at the bottom of the pyramid.” January set his lantern on a rock and knelt; blood glittered on Hannibal’s face through a mask of dust and filth. “Do you think you can walk?”

  “That would entirely depend on who was chasing me. God . . . !” he added as he turned over to let January cut the rawhide thong that bound his wrists, but when January helped him up he could stand on his left leg, his right arm over January’s huge shoulders. “Naturally,” he panted, breathless with shock and pain, “the one time I don’t have a bottle on me . . .”

  January made a loop of the bottom of the rope and passed it under Hannibal’s arms, climbed to the top, and hauled him up, not the ideal way to bring up a man with an injured leg but preferable to trying to make the climb with the fiddler clinging to his back. He said, when they reached the top and Hannibal sank down gasping to the floor, “I could get Rose. . . .”

  “And leave Don Prospero free to wake up and wander about as he will? I’ll be well in a moment, amicus meus, I promise you. Give me but a minute and I’ll skip like a ram in the springtime—let us only get out of here now, at once.” The tiny brush-fire beside Lobo had already burned itself nearly out. Hannibal glanced over his shoulder at the shape of Mictlantecuhtli, brooding amid blood and flowers in the dark.

  January paused only long enough to check on Lobo, who—not much to his surprise—was dead. Loath as he was to leave two men unburied and unprotected, he could think of no easy way—and no reason beyond respect—to transport them to the city. They would have enough trouble with Anastasio and Hannibal. The moment they left, he reflected, the coyotes would arrive. Like everyone else tonight, they, too, would have their dinner with the dead.

  “Anastasio and his myrmidons came to my room only minutes after I retired,” Hannibal said as January helped him down the pyramid’s endless steep slope. His voice was shaky, and he spoke, January guessed, to keep his mind from the pain in his leg. “I’d played for the ghosts in the cemetery all last night, and damned interesting it was, too, even if the vaqueros wouldn’t let me leg it over the wall. . . . Which is apparently what the lovely Valentina has done. The whole place was in an uproar all day about it, with everyone accusing everyone else and Don Prospero ranting. . . .”

  “Never mind about that,” said January. “I talked to her. She’s eloping with a Texian.”

  “I hope he beats her. Well, by the time it was ascertained that no, she wasn’t at Fructosa and no, she wasn’t at Saragosse and no, Doña Filomena hadn’t seen her since they entered the Saragosse churchyard . . . It wasn’t much of a party here tonight. Doña Josefa elected to spend the night on her bare knees in the chapel; Don Prospero locked himself in his study to brood about where he was going to get another chef in time for Christmas—that was absolutely all he said, or seemed to think, about poor Guillenormand’s death. Casimiro and I sat up for a little in the sala playing monte with Hinojo, but if any of the deceased put in an appearance, they wouldn’t have found it any more exciting than a dull afternoon in Heaven. Did they add to the height of this pyramid while we were inside? Surely it wasn’t this far to the bottom when we came up.”

  Hannibal was sweating, clammy, and trembling with shock by the time they reached the bottom. Still, when January asked “Do you think you can ride?” Hannibal replied, “To get out of Don Prospero’s immediate vicinity before he wakes up, I assure you, I’ll walk. Just get my boot off,” he added when January helped him to sit on the serpent-head. “I’ve had these
boots since I was up at Oxford, and if my leg is broken, I don’t want to have to razor it off. They’re the only ones I’ve got.”

  “I thought you won thousands of pesos off Don Prospero at picquet.” Rose handed him the brandy-flask from January’s coat.

  Hannibal drained it without pausing for breath. “Back at Mictlán. With my fiddle . . .”

  “We’ll send Consuela for them once we get into town. Hold on. This will hurt.”

  “So will hanging.” Hannibal closed his eyes.

  Once Hannibal’s boot was off, January felt his leg and thigh as carefully as he could, and found what he thought was a break in the tibia just below the knee. It was hard to tell, and he could only splint the place with the ramrods from his own and Rose’s pistols, and lift his friend onto the back of Rose’s horse behind the saddle for the ride back to town. Then he went to help Rose lift Anastasio’s body onto the calmest and most dispirited of the other horses, slinging it over the saddle like game.

  “Why not simply kill Prospero?” asked Rose softly as she roped a serape over the man she’d made dinner conversation with not two weeks before. Blood stained her collar where Anastasio would have cut her throat as he’d cut the chef Guillenormand’s without the slightest thought that here was someone he’d known and respected—in Guillenormand’s case, for years.

  Only because it was an expedient thing to do.

  “With Fernando dead, there was no danger to Anastasio’s property. Not as long as Casimiro is a child. Why set up a fake ritual here to have Prospero declared mad?”

  “Declared mad?” Hannibal, clinging to the cantle of Rose’s saddle, raised his eyebrows almost to his retreating hairline. “My dearest Athene, we are past fine distinctions about hawks and handsaws here and deep into the realm of Lucia di Lammermoor, in case it has escaped your notice.”

  “I suspect,” January answered, “because Santa Anna doesn’t like Don Anastasio—and Don Anastasio couldn’t be sure that Prospero hadn’t told the President about Don Anastasio being his pensioner. Everyone in Mexico City must know that Doña Gertrudis was forced to become a duenna, even if they don’t know the precise circumstances.”