by Carla Kelly
“Is this what you seek?”
Maria gasped and whirled around. Cristóbal was sitting cross-legged by the ovens, his back to their warmth. He was holding the moccasins.
He was dressed only in a loincloth, his legs and arms painted white like the Indian runners on the old Taos trail. His hair, usually worn pulled back and tied at his neck, was long and flowing loose.
He rose and walked toward her. Maria backed toward the footbridge, her throat constricting so she could not cry out. He held out the moccasins. “Come, take them,” he said. His face shone ghastly white in the moonlight. He smiled. His teeth were blackened, and he looked like a death’s head.
Her fear gave way to humiliation and anger. “How could you sit there and watch me!”
He laughed and handed over the moccasins. “It was easy, Maria chiquita,” he replied, mocking Diego’s words, “although I must say that if Diego could see you the way I saw you, he would not call you a ‘small one.’ But then, who is to say that he has not already seen you thus, eh? My brother, el santo. Maybe that is why you refuse my offer of safety, my offer of marriage. Maybe that is why you refuse me.”
He laughed again, stepping closer, and she slapped him. He reached out and grabbed her wrist. “You will wish you had not done that,” he hissed as she tried to wriggle out of his grasp.
“Let go of me!”
He released her as suddenly as he had grabbed her. Maria stood still on the footbridge, rubbing her wrist. The towel wrapped around her hair had fallen into the water, but she made no motion to retrieve it.
“Go into the hacienda,” he commanded. “Tell Diego that you have seen me and how I am dressed. Perhaps he will understand. Perhaps he will take the warning.”
Without a word, Maria rushed past him and ran down the garden path, slamming the kitchen door behind her. Diego had heard the door slam and was standing in the hall. She ran toward him. By the time she got to the door of his room, he had his sword out. He pulled her into his room and blew out the candle with one motion.
“Qué pasa, chiquita?” he whispered.
She had told herself that she would not cry, but she could not stop the tears. “Oh, Diego, Cristóbal is in the garden! He watched me bathe. Dios mio, I am so ashamed. He told me he has come in warning.”
Diego released her and raced down the hall. She heard the door to the kitchen garden opening, then there was silence. With flint and steel, Maria lit the candle again and sat on the bed. She looked down at her hand. It was streaked white where she had struck Cristóbal.
She heard Diego in the hall again. He threw his sword down on the bed when he entered the room and sat next to her. “No one was there, Maria.”
Maria stared at him, then lowered her eyes. Her hand, stained with white from Cristóbal’s face, was proof that she had not merely imagined his appearance. It was proof also of the anger and violence that stalked the land. “He said I was to tell you how he had come. Diego, he looked like those Indians on the road today. He didn’t look like himself. He was terrifying.” She buried her face into Diego’s shoulder.
“Cristóbal is a man torn in half,” Diego whispered, his hand on her damp hair. “The Indian half has won. But perhaps there is something we can do.” He stood, pulled her to her feet, and led her to the wooden wardrobe in the corner of his room. “Maria, can you use an arquebus, a firing piece?”
She shook her head.
“I would be more surprised if you could, but you are a woman of some resource.”
“Gracias,” she replied, a ghost of a smile crossing her face.
He opened the wardrobe. A cry of rage escaped him. “Dios! Someone has already taken it!”
Maria leaned against his arm and felt him tremble. He looked at her, and the age in his eyes was even more frightening than Cristóbal’s death mask. He took his dagger out of his belt and handed it to her, then pulled his leather cloak out of the wardrobe, the same cloak he had worn when he had found her after the Indian massacre. He slung it around his shoulders, swiftly knotting the cords.
“Let us go, querida.”
Erlinda met them in the hall. Her face drained of color as she saw her brother’s expression. Diego put his hand on her arm. “I am going out to look for the horses.”
“What about prayers?” Erlinda managed, clinging to his hand as if to stop him.
“Pray for me tonight, Erlinda. For all of us. Come, Maria. I will talk as I saddle Tirant.”
They left the hacienda through the kitchen garden and crossed the footbridge. “After I leave, tell one of my Mexican servants to pull the water barrel inside the kitchen and fill it. Close and bar all the shutters. See if you can find my dogs and bring them inside, too.” He stopped. “Where are the dogs? I haven’t heard them all evening. Well, anyway, my guards will be on the hacienda roof, as they always are.”
They reached the stables and Diego put out his arm suddenly, pushing Maria back. She heard him suck in his breath, then looked around his arm and grabbed it.
Tacked to the adobe wall of the stable were Diego’s dogs, gutted and spread out, their heads hanging down, their blood dripping in the dust. Maria covered her eyes with her hands. When she took them away, the dogs were still hanging, their gray coats dark with blood.
“Now we know where the dogs are,” said Diego quietly. He took out his sword again. “Do not follow me.”
She waited in the horse corral, unable to move. Diego called to her finally, and she jumped. “Come, Maria, and quickly,” he said.
She ran into the stable, staying as far away from the gutted dogs as she could. Diego was leading Tirant from his stall. He hurriedly saddled and bridled the animal, talking to her as he worked.
“Open the doors to no one—I mean no one—except me tomorrow, but if you should see any of the upper valley rancheros passing this way, going toward Santa Fe, get them to take you and my family with them. Even if you have to walk alongside their horses. Do not leave alone. But if I should not return by midday tomorrow, then go. But stay off the roads.”
“Will Erlinda and your mother listen to me?” Maria asked as Diego swung into the saddle.
“I honestly do not know, and I have not time to find out. I am going back to the old Taos road. I am going to watch there and see what I can see.” Before he ducked out of the stable, he snatched a coil of rope hanging by the door.
Maria ran after him into the corral. He looked back at her. “Bless you, Maria querida,” he said and disappeared into the darkness.
She stood there a moment in the empty corral. She looked down at her white hand. It still held Diego’s dagger. She climbed through the fence and hurried across the footbridge.
The Mexican servants were all gathered in the kitchen, silent and watchful. In a voice that did not sound like her own, Maria directed two of the men to close and bar all the shutters, and another to haul in the water barrel. She told the other men to mount the roof for the nightly watch. “Bring your families into the chapel tonight,” she added. “Make sure all the doors are triple-bolted tonight.” She hurried down the hall to the chapel and met Erlinda coming out.
“They are bedded down, Maria,” she said. “Mama is sleeping, and I told the girls a story tonight.” They walked arm in arm back to the kitchen. Erlinda watched the men filling the water barrel inside by the back door. “Diego fears an Apache raid?” she asked.
Maria shook her head. “It is the Pueblo Indians that he fears.”
Erlinda stared at her, an incredulous look on her face. “Maria, you are joking! Has my brother lost all reason? His Indians are not capable of mischief. Oh, they steal, they lie, but they do not raid. ”
Maria thought of the gutted dogs and Cristóbal in his white paint but said nothing.
“However, Diego would have us safe, rather than sorry, and I bless him for that. Someday he and I will laugh about this!” Erlinda turned to the men, who, having finished filling the barrel, stood waiting. “Do as you always do, my servants. Go to your families. Thi
s will be over tomorrow.”
The men bowed and left. Erlinda looked at Maria, who was staring into the glowing coals in the fireplace. “Come to my room, Maria, I will brush your hair and braid it for you.”
They spent the next hour in Erlinda’s room, Maria listening in silence as Erlinda chattered about her future visit to Santa Fe. She was not usually so voluble. Did she too sense the danger and seek to ward it off with words? Did she believe her counterfeit cheer would cheer Maria?
Finally Maria went to her own room. Luz and Catarina were sleeping in the same bed, curled up close to each other. Maria pulled the blankets up higher around their shoulders and made sure the small fire in the grid was properly banked. Closing the door behind her, she went into the hall again. All was quiet in the chapel, so she went to Diego’s room, picking up his dagger from the hall table where she had left it.
She lit the candle in his room and sat down on the bed, propping his pillow behind her head and leaning against the wall. The fire had not been lit in his room that night, and the air was chilly. Maria pulled her legs up tight against her body and rested her chin on her knees. She heard the Mexican guards on the roof as they walked back and forth, watching. She closed her eyes finally on the reassuring sounds of the guards.
Maria roused herself at intervals throughout the night, her heart pounding as she listened for the slow steps of the guards. Finally dawn illuminated the Sangre de Cristo Mountains.
Chapter 12
El Terror
She woke with a start, sitting up in Diego’s bed. During the night she had crept between the sheets and covered herself with his Indian blanket. Out of habit, she reached out with her toes to feel for his sword. Of course it was not there. Diego was gone, and she felt a longing for him that was both more terrible than anything she had ever known, and more wonderful.
She propped the pillow up against the end of the bed again and picked up the Masferrer family journal. It was open to yesterday’s entry. “August 8,” she read, squinting in the early morning light. Diego’s handwriting was large and sprawling and hard to read. “A visit to Emiliano with my Maria. She learned to make a saint out of cottonwood. Trouble with my Indians, with my brother. The horses are gone, the wagons burned, the fields empty of farmers. Father, what would you have me do?”
Maria put her head down on the parchment. With his words of instruction last night, he had transferred some of his burdens to her shoulders, and the weight was heavy.
She wiped her eyes and set the journal back on the little table next to a wine bottle and silver cup. She picked up the bottle and took a large swallow, thinking about her mother. “A lady drinks only from a cup, Maria.” She took another drink from Diego’s bottle and shoved the cork back in, thinking how he would tease her if the bottle were half empty when he returned.
If he returned. Fear pulsed in her veins and made her temples throb. She got out of his bed, straightening the pillow and arranging the covers. The pillow smelled of lavender now, but she did not think he would mind.
She went into the hall. The Mexican servants were up as usual, the women making their familiar kitchen clatter as they prepared breakfast, the men attending to their chores outside. As she approached the kitchen, she saw that the shutters were open already. The steady rap of hammers and whine of saws from across the acequia told her that they were at work on the wagons again.
Erlinda was setting the table for breakfast. “God’s blessing on you, Maria,” she said as always, her cool blond serenity camouflaging the difference of this day.
“And His Mercy on you, Erlinda,” Maria answered as always, struck by a feeling of unreality as if she were floating through a nightmare of her own creation.
“Mama is asking for Diego,” Erlinda said. “Would you see if he has returned?”
Maria hurried through the kitchen, admonishing the women to close and bar all the shutters again on her way. She heard the servants giggling behind her back, but she had no authority to make them obey her.
Maria went into the garden, her eyes going immediately to Diego’s Apache moccasins, lying where she had dropped them when she’d slapped Cristóbal. She looked at her hand, but the white paint had worn off. She sat down on the ledge by the oven and put on the moccasins, doing up the laces rapidly, then hurried through the garden and crossed the footbridge, toward the stable.
One of the Mexican servants had cut down the dogs, and the animals now lay on the ground in a puddle of dried blood. Maria looked around and swallowed. She had not noticed in last night’s darkness, but the unknown butcher had draped the animals’ entrails over the fence. A servant was now removing the offal, looping it over his arm and dropping it on the pile by the stable doors.
“Have you seen Señor Masferrer?” she called, shading her eyes against the rising sun.
“No, Señorita, he is not here.”
She hurried back to the hacienda, pausing only long enough to fish her towel out of the acequia, where it had snagged on a cottonwood limb. In the kitchen, Luz and Catarina looked up from their morning mush and chocolate. Maria flashed what she hoped was a reassuring smile. “Girls, Diego has asked that you play indoors today. Something quiet on the patio. If you are good, I will tell you stories in the afternoon.”
She expected an argument from them, some words of protest at confinement on such a beautiful day. Instead, they followed her quietly down to the patio. Luz turned to her Indian doll that Cristóbal had carved for her, picking up the toy and patting the Pueblo blanket, bright with design, around the wooden figure. Catarina picked up her embroidery, watching Maria through troubled eyes. When Luz sat down next to her, crooning to her doll, Catarina edged closer on the bench. Clearly the children sensed something.
Maria left the girls and walked to the front of the hacienda, throwing back the bolts on the door with difficulty and walking into the coolness of the portal, where honeybees were already gathering around the opening flowers. She could see no movement on the road passing the hacienda. She walked down to the big iron gate, but did not open it. The road was deserted. By this time of morning, there were usually laborers trudging to the fields, children hurrying to small labors, women carrying market goods from Tesuque to the nearby haciendas. Today there was no one.
She looked north past the cornfields. No sign of Diego. She would wait until midday for his return. If he was not back by then, they must follow his instructions and leave. With a great weight on her heart, she went back inside, locking the front door behind her and throwing the bolts in the cool silence of the foyer. She paused, leaning against the door, all strength gone.
When she had gathered her ragged emotions into some imitation of serenity, she returned to the kitchen, where she could see Erlinda from the window, heating water in the yard for the washing. Maria walked past her without speaking and crossed the footbridge again, looking to the cornfield, willing Diego to appear, even as she despaired of seeing his dear face again.
And then she saw him. She ran past the stable, ignoring Erlinda’s cries. She gathered her skirts around her and ran into the field, crossing it at an angle. Her mother would have been shocked at such a display of legs and petticoats, but Maria did not care.
He was riding slowly down the Taos road, tugging two Indians after him on a rope. She ran to the road and waited for him. The Indians were white-painted, their hair long. One of them stared at her hard, then looked away. The other walked with his head down, scuffing at the dirt.
Diego dismounted and walked stiffly toward Maria. His clothes were covered with dust and there were deep circles under his eyes. Maria ran to him. She put her hands on his arm, but said nothing.
“I heard them early this morning, Maria. Not long before sunrise. They tripped over the rope I had stretched across the road. There were three of them. One got away. He ran back toward Taos. Look here, Maria.” He reached into his shirt front and pulled out two of the curious cords they had seen yesterday. She took them from him gingerly, as if they were living t
hings. Each cord was about a foot long, woven tightly of maguey fiber. She fingered the knots. “Four knots?” She glanced back at the Indians, who were watching them with an intensity that made her stomach turn.
“Four days, Maria. Four days until there is an uprising. I am sure of it now.” He looked south down the road and sighed. “Do you suppose Governor Otermin will believe me if I tell him? Or will he throw me into prison for returning to town against his orders?
She looked at him and willed herself to serenity.
“I do not have time to stop at Las Invernadas. Tell everyone not to worry. I will be back from Santa Fe before sundown. I will try to bring some help with me, some horses, a wagon. At any rate, we will leave here tomorrow morning. No later.” He paused and leaned against his horse. “Maria, Maria,” he said, his eyes closed, his face half-turned to Tirant.
She put her hand on his arm and he reached for her, hugging her. “Dios mio, I am afraid, querida,” he said in a whisper. She leaned against him, and he stroked her cheek with his gloved hand. Then he straightened, glancing behind him at the two figures now squatting in the dust.
“If there is time,” he began, not meeting her eyes, “I will return through Tesuque and persuade Father Pio to join us here.”
“Diego, if there is any way, could you ...”
“Could I collect your little saint?” he finished for her, the smile crossing his face at odds with the bleakness in his eyes. “I will try, Maria, you know I will. We will need all the blessings of all the saints. We have four days.”
“Go there only if it is safe, Diego,” she insisted. “After all, it is only a possession.”
“You have another possession, Maria, one which will always be with you.”
“Tell me what it is, Señor.”
