She looked me over, spat, and interrogated me. Did I have the pox? Did I know how to fuck? To suck? She was crude, but this was her trade, and she knew it well. Did I have nice clothes? “This is a fine establishment,” she said. I was prepared and showed her the blue dress. I knew what sort of place this was? Yes, I had done such work before, yes, in the New World. I was from there, having been raised in Cuba but from Mexico, I said. A native, yes. This raised her eyebrows, and, like that, I was in.
Being a “native girl” was an attraction. Most English men had never seen a girl from southern Europe, let alone an exotic from New Spain. I plied my trade for several weeks, appearing every evening, flirting, laughing, drinking with the men. I adopted a thick Indian accent, and Maggie hinted that I had been one of the sacred prostitutes in the Aztec capital.
There had been such, but they had died or fled when Cortez arrived a hundred years before. I had met one early in Mexico, and an old woman who claimed to have seen Cortez and Montezuma together when she had been a girl. She claimed that she was a priestess of a goddess of pleasure and money, though she was, when I met her, just an old woman who cared for a group of much younger whores. Her ministrations consisted mostly of sniffing at the girls, claiming to smell venereal disease. She was mad, but we had talked at length of what she remembered of her youth, so I knew enough to fake my way as an Aztec whore among those ignorant of such places and people.
After a week or two, I drew the eye of someone well-connected to the Court. A tall man, dark-haired, well-dressed. He was a minor noble but was interested in me, and having heard of me (courts are nothing but cesspits of gossip), he sought to meet me. I latched onto him. It is easy, you know, for women to convince men they are special and interesting. Men are like plants; tend to their basic needs and they bloom. Most of them never use their brains when dealing with women. Why should they, if they see their reflection and find it pleasing?
We must have spent quite some time together, as I have a jumble of memories of him and I in London in winter, then a country place in the summer, with bumblebees and honey, fresh milk and cheese, and a large stone house with stables. He was rich, or his family was, which back then meant the same thing. Gentry does nothing other than amass wealth.
As lovely as the house and grounds were, I fretted. I needed to find that woman! I brooded and raised the suggestion we should be back in London.
I got my wish. A few weeks later when we were back in the city, and attending Court, they presented me to the King. He was tall, with red hair, and had a long, straight nose down which he looked at me as if I were a curiosity. His attendants flanked him, and he spoke to them behind his hand, nodding and listening. I curtsied and retired. I saw his eyes flow over me the way men’s eyes will travel down a woman, undressing her visually, but I don’t think he lusted after me. He was curious, but not overly so. A whore from the New World? It was a novelty, nothing more. He looked bored.
There was a party. I guess you would call it a ball, or a masque. Whichever. I could never keep their terms straight. There was a play which the whole court was attentive to. I think these plays and pantomime shows loaded with symbols and arcane, inside jokes, were part of the general jostling for whatever scraps of power were to be had for those surrounding the throne. They jibed at this noble or that, ascribed virtue or imputed vice, and fawned all over the ruling class, reinforcing their notion that their system, this whole facade of monarchy, was right and just, and the way things ought to be.
Oh, I pass no judgement, myself. People do crazy things when picking their governance; this mania comes in different forms, builds on the past forms, or on what people believe the past traditions were. It’s the religion of power, which we humans put great stock in, like all our religions.
There was a party, that I remember. I wore my dress, though by this time I had others purchased at great expense by my paramour, but I wore my original blue gown, and had loaded one of its pockets with a slim dagger, a lady’s blade, which I had also cozened him to buy me for protection, should he not be with me and I should need it.
At the party, there was food and wine, and a thousand candles suspended from great chandeliers. Dancing, which, being an ignorant savage from New Spain, I was spared. It was formal and everyone seemed well practiced in the steps, moves, and counter-moves. Such dances mingled people, and spun them off into clumps and knots around the periphery of the ballroom to chat and talk and watch the others.
There was much watching. All courts are thus. Who is this one, that one, talking over there, about what? He is with her, is he? She with him? Public displays of support or displeasure, from the King on down, all aping each other in their dumb show for their little patch of power or wealth. I am uncharitable, I know, but it is like this, although I am sure that some who play such games are clear-eyed realists who know their worth and play for family survival. It’s all silly and sad. These people were the descendants of the nasty folks who came before them, and were doing what they knew how to do, based on what they learned at their fathers’ knees.
I was watching the crowd, smiling when introduced by my companion, pretending to speak less English than I did. I played a good fish out of water nervous and skittish, stumbling over my words, not laughing at the right times, and laughing at the wrong ones. I kept my eyes open, though, and then, when we presented to the Earl of Buckingham, a woman dressed all in white, with red ribbons laced down her sleeves, turned and I saw her. I saw her, and I knew her. It was her, the one I had seen in my dreams, the one I needed to meet. She was here, as I knew she must be.
As they introduced me to the Earl, who eyed me coldly but smiled and nodded, I could feel her eyes on me. She stood with him but not possessively, a good body’s width between them, her eyes not checking his the way a jealous woman will track where her husband’s eyes land when speaking with a rival female. Her eyes were on me, her head cocked. Her pupils wide and dark and there was a slight flare of her nostrils, but beyond that, nothing. Just appraisal, she leaned in and whispered to Buckingham, smiling and nodding at me.
This is Lady Elena, they told me, wife of the Spanish Ambassador, come from Hispaniola. Perhaps you two know each other from there? She smiled, taking my hand. Her fingers were long and strong inside her gloves and pressed mine firmly. I could sense my lover’s shame as she stepped in, took my arm, and began to walk with me, guiding me away from the Earl and the others, her chattering to me in Spanish like we were old friends. I don’t remember the first thing about what she said as she steered me towards a knot of women, who glared over tight smiles as we passed.
There was a short hallway beyond, which was quiet. I went with her, not resisting, as her grip was firm on my arm. I felt as if I was in a dream, for I had seen her face, or known it from long dreaming. Her hair was brown and long, tied and knotted in elaborate braids with red ribbons. Her skin, pale and powdered, was olive toned. Her eyes were very dark. She stopped her chattering when we entered a side room and faced me, her eyes staring into mine. Neither of us said anything to the other, just stared. There was tension, like a long, high note of a stringed instrument the ear might just hear, drawn out between us. Finally, she said. Finally, I said. Finally.
Chapter Eighteen
For a long time, Jessica sat, thinking, as we drove through the night. I had recounted my experience of how I had fled New Spain as a pirate, and wound up in the Court of King James II. Perhaps I had embellished here and there, for if I were to recount strictly, only, solely what I remember, it would just be a series of fragments. There is a narrative to any journey, and not just beads of a story on a string. Each bead tied firmly to what goes before it for a story to be coherent.
“Something doesn’t make sense,” she said, after a time.
“Many things make little sense,” I said, not looking at her. “Which things?”
“You have this long life, where you can be anything, do anything.” Accusation, perhaps resentment. “You said yourself you influence people,
steer them. You could have, maybe, done more?”
I drove for a while. We were approaching St. Louis; the suburbs were thickening up. Big box stores. 7-11. Wingstop. “More?” I said, just to keep her talking, though I suspected where she was going.
“Yes,” she blurted. “Why didn’t you, you know, take over somewhere. Be a queen or something. Work for change. Lasting change. Like, make life better for people.”
I changed lanes. We would need gas soon, and I dislike urban areas these days. Too many cameras, too close to the network. We had changed cars, buying this one off a lot in West Virginia. The Crown Vic we had abandoned. This was a Jeep Cherokee, which I’ve always liked, and was relatively new, with all-wheel drive, cruise control and, hopefully, fewer traceable electronics in it than in newer cars. Some have always-on GPS units for roadside help these days. The holes in the net get smaller.
“How do you know I didn’t?” I said, making sure she could hear the smile in my voice. “Be a queen, that is.”
“Did you?” she said. Incredulity. Suspicion.
I shook my head. I have been a queen before, several times I remembered. It’s a comfortable life. “Not really. Or rather, not recently,” I said. “And what you really mean is, why didn’t I fix the world more? Something like that? I’ve had time to, right?” I have had this conversation with others, too, in my life. You have a gift, and you squander it.
She was silent. “Yes,” she said, after a while. “Why didn’t you fix the world more?”
The world is unfixable, I wanted to say, but didn’t. How can one person, even a long-lived person such as I, change human nature? People are what people are. Monkeys with oversized brains and clever fingers. Live in groups. Love each other, hate each other.
“Is the world broken, really?” I said, more to myself than to her, though I knew the answer.
“Clearly,” she said. “Nuclear war, poverty, disease. FUBAR.”
“Well, I have helped some people with wealth, many peoples rise out of poverty. But there are always others to take their place. Diseases, I may have helped in spots. I’ve saved many individuals, helped many people. I’ve been a doctor before, more than once.” I laughed. “Nukes… I will admit, with the nukes I fucked up.”
“Is this all just a big joke to you?” she said. “You laugh it off.”
“They have given me a gift, is your point, then?” I said. “And I haven’t done enough with it to suit you?” I turned off the highway, we needed to get gas, and the sign said there was a Flying J ahead. The Flying Dutchman, I thought.
“I’m just saying…it seems like you could have done something…different,” she said. “I don’t know. I’m just having a hard time with all of this.”
“I get it. I have done many things, you know. More things than I can remember.” I sighed. “Some of them good, some bad. Some happy, some sad.” I smiled at her, it was nearing dawn, the sky lightening behind us as we pulled into the gas station. I gave her two twenties and asked her to pay for the gas.
When the pump came on, I stood, squeezing the handle, and looked around. Suburbia. This was more or less flat country, with only a few hills off to the west. Suburban America is ugly. No one plans it that way, but nobody cares enough to make it not consistently ugly. Time treats shoddy construction badly, I have found, which is one reason people first turned to stone buildings. It preserves legacy better than wood, which is paper. Paper houses. Trash houses.
Jessica came back with bottles of water and some candy bars. She handed me the change and said, “Sorry, I didn’t mean to be rude. I just…” She spread her hands. “It’s a lot to take in.”
I nodded, smiling gently at her. “It is a lot.” Try living it, I didn’t say. Unfair and mean. People, normal people who learn what I am, can be difficult about it. I’m not normal, and most of what people say to me is just noise, which I can filter and respond to with rote, almost pre-programmed responses, depending on the situation. But judgment, judgment of my actions, of whether I have done enough or could have done more, been better. This can make me angry, this can sting.
I pointed to the low hills ahead of us. “See that? That’s Cahokia, I think.” She looked. “A big native civilization was here more than a thousand years ago. That’s a big mound made by people. Probably a grave underneath it once.”
She looked at it. “Huh. I read about that. It’s like a pyramid. Is that really it?” She looked at me. “You weren’t here, though, right?”
“Not me, but I heard about it. I can tell you a little. Been thinking about it a lot as we drove up here. She was here then. She was a queen here for many years before it fell apart. That’s the thing which you can’t really get. Things fall apart,” I said. Things fall apart.
“She was here? A thousand years ago?” She looked dubious, in the set of her shoulders, the cock of her head.
“She was all through here. In the north and the south. She was…look, you want to see what happens when someone sticks around somewhere, someone like me, knowing what we know, for long? I told you about me, so you know how I am.” I looked at Jessica. The pump thrummed under my hand, clicking off with finality. Click, thump. I replaced it. “Let’s go.”
I got in the car. I could see Jessica hesitating. Anger. Blame. Fear. She got in, the door snicking shut.
I started the car but didn’t drive. “You know what they found here, when they dug it up? Archaeologists. All around you, right here. She told me what they did here, and I looked, much later in a library, to see if it was true.” I could almost hear her breathing next to me in the dark, telling me her story, such as I am telling you. What she remembered. What she dreamed of.
Jessica was looking at me, I realized. I reached for the keys, realized the car was running, and put it in gear. I drove back onto the highway. The dawn was all around us now, orange and red and pink, glaring to bright yellow behind. Another day. I flipped the mirror up. Jessica was silent.
“They found graves. Mass graves. Boys with no heads or hands. People buried alive, dead while trying to dig their way out of the pits they were thrown into. Girls, teens and twenties, sacrificed. That was her, her doing. That was her trying, honestly trying to make things better. She told me. I remember.” I remembered what she told me, and that was plenty. It was worse in the South.
“Wait, what was her name?” Jessica said, holding up her hand to stop me. Assertion, challenge.
“We decided on Gold, since she loved it,” I said. “She had another name, but it was a lie. She was a great liar, you see. She never told me her real name, what she was born with. She claimed not to remember it, but I think she’s full of shit.” I smiled.
“Like, Gold, the metal?” She laughed bitterly. “So you’re Silver and she is Gold?”
“I know, corny, huh? I think so too, now. Sometimes. But then, it made sense,” I said. “She was from here, originally, from the New World. I know that part is true.”
“How, if she was untrustworthy?” she said. Amusement, bitterness.
“Untrustworthy? Is that journalism? She told lies, and a simpler, shorter word for that is liar,” I said. She glared at me.
“There are laws against calling people liars,” she snapped. “Someone could sue me, that’s why reporters have issues with that word. Liar, whatever. How do you know she wasn’t lying?”
“She knew too much about the history and peoples of this place. Stuff she could only know if she’d been here all along. She loved gold, so we called her Gold. It suited her.”
“You knew her well? For a long time?” she said.
I nodded. I had. “Yes, for a long time. And yes, quite well.” I glanced at her. “I know her as well as I ever knew anybody.”
“Where is she now?” I could feel her looking at me and didn’t return her gaze.
“I don’t know.” I glanced at her. Gave her a smile. “We kind of broke up.”
“So she killed those people? In the graves?” I could hear the accusation in her voice.
I looked at her, caught her eye. “Hey, I didn’t do it. I wasn’t there,” I said. “I knew her much later.”
“She’d changed?” she said.
Changed. Maybe. “People change, Jessica,” I said. “That’s what happens to everyone, and it’s worse for us. This is what I am trying to explain. People change. You did, you’re not the same person who went to the high school, right? I change too, and so does she. That’s the point.”
“What do you mean?” she said. Confusion.
“I mean that no matter what intentions we might have, things never, and I mean never, stay on track for long. Make plans, try to stick with an agenda, a long-term plan, it’s impossible. Especially at a macro-level, you know, the big picture stuff like governance, economies, food production. It’s impossible. We’re just not good at it for long. We can keep it up for a while, but eventually things break down. Automation has helped stabilize things, since now a lot of the human factors have been removed from production of food, for example. It’s repeatable in a way it hasn’t been before. Predictable. This is new.”
She looked at me. Puzzlement spreading like an oil slick over her face in the early dawn light.
“People change, we get bored. We get angry. We’re just like everybody else, except we’re not at all like you.” I smiled. “I mean we’re broken, okay? That’s how I can describe it best. Broken, and we’ve been broken for a long, long time. We don’t remember things right, and our minds don’t work right because of it.” I nodded, to myself. “And we dream.”
Chapter Nineteen
My dreams are of, as I have said, a sea and a song. The song is the sea, perhaps, or the sea is the song. It’s all strange. I remember colors of all sorts, vivid beyond anything I have ever seen awake. Lattices of song so dense and deep, it’s more like a million million strands of a single dreamsong tapestry. No words I know are in the song, but there are words, maybe it is all words, I cannot say. It is dense beyond measure. Endless in all directions.
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