Hunger's Brides (34 page)

On the third day I was able to get up and walk about a bit. All morning Amanda was helping her mother prepare a feast for a mystery guest the following night.

But what an uproar had been coming from the corrals since yesterday. Finally I wobbled out to see.

What had sounded the day before like the cattle of Peleus being savaged by a sea wolf was in fact only slightly less dramatic—our cows being bred to the black bull from Chimalhuacan. This normally took place in the far paddock but with the pumas about and the jaguar attack some time back, mother had brought the bull nearer the house. Two days in bed and already life had passed me by.

Abuelo intercepted me between the library and the kitchen. “Are you sure you're strong enough to be up? I should have dried you off properly myself.”

“I'm feeling much better, Abuelito.”

He didn't say anything for a minute. Normally he would have had his arm around my shoulders by now. “Maybe you should stay inside, Juanita. We've been seeing a lot of snakes in the yard since the fire.”

Snakes. Was there to be a plague of snakes now? All this time Amanda
and I should have been reading Exodus! Standing next to Abuelo, with the portal so excruciatingly near, I had visions of our captivity here being drawn out by spiders next, then scorpions. Vicious termites, butterflies …

“Angelina, would you mind coming to read something for me? There are some pages in bad repair. With all the smoke in the air and the dust, my eyes …”

I saw, finally, that he'd come out expressly to keep me from the corral, yet his green eyes were indeed red and bleary, as though he'd been the one ill. Titanic on the day of the fire, he had seemed subdued since.

Cancionero general
. A waterlogged and mouldered copy of an anthology of lyrics. It looked three centuries old, but proved to be scarcely half that. The selection truly
was
hard to read, but as much for its beauty as for the damage to its pages. Verses by Jorge Manrique. In time, I would come to know this, his most famous poem, as if it were my own—the one, when the day came, it was a mercy not to have to write.

It was this poem Grandfather asked me to read now at the little table under the library window. After the fourth stanza he held up his hand. “There. That was the part I had been wanting to hear again.” We sat quietly a moment afterwards. “I must have told you. Manrique's father, the Count of Paredes, was an Iberian hero. The second Cid, they called him, so great was his glory. Founder of the Order of Santiago, our highest military order. And fighting at his side was his son, our great poet.” As Abuelo added this, his chest was big with emotion. He rested a trembling hand on my arm as was his habit, while for a moment his eyes wandered into the empty space above the courtyard. “Then the father would die, then the son—both defending Queen Isabela.”

“But Abuelo, we live in America.”

“One does not cease to be a loyal subject of the Crown. Not by mere accident of geography. Without
los Manrique
, truly there would be no Spain today.”

I asked Grandfather to tell me about tomorrow night's dinner guest. I knew he was a military officer. Yes, of the rank of lance-captain. Isabel had met him while chaperoning Josefa and María at the ball in Amecameca. A
ball?
Yes, Juanita, two nights ago.

At the courtyard's centre stood the well, a small turret of mortared fieldstone. On the east side of it, a big armspan away, lay the firepit, bounded by squared blocks of the same origin and shape as the flagstones but thicker. Within that ring the flags had been pulled up; outside it, lengths of log lay in a gnarled circlet girdling the pit. Stripped of their bark, they were otherwise indistinguishable from those around a real explorer's campfire. And this was exactly how Abuelo had made it feel for us, from the very first night of our arrival from our old home in Nepantla.

On a clear evening, if we went there straight after dinner, from behind the hills to the west a good deal of light would still be coming up, the stories flowing as the light ebbed, infused, in that fading, with a loneliness. It would be just the two of us now. My sisters had lost interest. Amanda was not allowed.

In that silence I would sometimes think about our first night in Panoayan, the only time Amanda had ever been there with us. María and Josefa were swinging at cobwebs with brooms. Xochitl was in the kitchen. It was full dark. Abuelo emerged from his room with a lantern and, tucked under his arm, a rectangular board. I caught sight of something else in his left hand. It was the first fire-bow I had seen.

“You
know what this is, Amanda,” he said, “do you not?”

She nodded shyly.

“Can you show me the Fire-Bow?” he asked her, swinging the lantern behind his back. What was this about? The thing was right there in his left hand.

But Amanda had not misunderstood him. She pointed up at the sky, and though it was a mass of stars, I was fairly sure she was pointing out Orion.

“Not those two?” Abuelo asked, pointing towards the constellation of Gemini. She shook her head. There spread across his face an immense smile of satisfaction. He turned to me excitedly. “As I thought, Angelina. There has been a confusion. Many have written that the Fire-Bow for the Mexica was in
los astillejos
, which we know today as Castor and Pollux. But the confusion was ours, since none other than Nebrija translates
los astillejos
directly from the Latin to mean not Gemini but Orion. And can you not see it there, clearly, a fire-bow in Orion's belt and sword?”

He held up the little bow and drill as if to impose them on the stars.

Still smiling with pleasure he offered her the bow. “You know how,” he said without a doubt in the world. He produced from a pocket in his vest a bit of paper in a tight fan-fold between his thumb and forefinger. As if it were a delicacy to eat he offered it to me, which eased the sting I'd felt at being passed over for the main honour. He explained that, in days gone by, papers folded just so had served as the ceremonial tinder. “And to drill this first fire,
señoritas
, was once the very greatest of occasions.”

And so we bent to the task as he guided us in how to work, very ceremoniously, together. By then my sisters had left off their sweeping and come to join us at the fire and together we prevailed upon Abuelo to let us sleep around the firepit, just this one night. The stories began. His first, as I recall, he left unfinished. And for this I blame my sisters' wide eyes and gasps of horror. For, pointing confidently at Orion now, Abuelo invited us to see the sky as he believed the first people here had—sitting perhaps on this very spot—as a chest cavity, a great carcass of night, the shell of its darkness cracked open, and at its heart the fire-bow drilling the first sparks of light and—

And that was all. He'd decided we were too young to hear the rest.

I was speechless the next day to hear Xochitl tell me Amanda wouldn't be coming to the firepit again. She would say no more. I simply could not imagine it was Abuelo, who had singled Amanda out for the honours just the night before. I ran to him to protest. He looked very grim. I believe he was hearing of it for the first time himself. He would say only that it hadn't been his idea. So it must have been Isabel—who didn't answer me at all. But why should she care?

The truth was that she didn't. Keeping Amanda from the firepit, keeping Amanda from being hurt, was not her concern.

I
tilted my face to the morning sky. Up from the pale thread that limned the peaks there fanned overhead a gradient of soft hues, and in its velvets and peacock plumes glinted brilliants of ruby and crystal, glimmers of ice blue and apple green … But I had no time to waste on sunrises. I ran to meet Amanda in the kitchen.

And then we did go. No earthly power could hold us, nor unearthly frog plagues, nor blood-spate, nor vicious cattle lice. We passed the first two streams that boiled and battered down the mountain. A little farther along and just before the third, the string of boulders where we crossed the river was wet and slippery with muddy brown water roaring and seething in places over the rocks. A day or two earlier we couldn't have crossed. At the trout pool we had a twinge of disappointment, but also what I took to be our first good omen. The water was too muddy to renew our acquaintance with the trout, but we did see an otter trundling off up the bank, and sideways in its mouth a big fish bobbing like a trout moustache. Amanda ran ahead of me up the long bridge of Ixayac's nose, each steep step a grimace in the muscles of her calves.

The face we saw in the features of the place—the nose and forehead, the eye-hollows and pine-topped brows—only emerged when we were far enough along the bridge to have left the surrounding trees behind. I finally caught up to her at the
umbral
. After three days in bed I felt faint, eyeing the handholds to the first bench.

“I'll follow you … up … in a minute.”

“We go together,” she said, puffing but pacing still in her eagerness to go on. She waited with me a moment, then picked up both our satchels. She slung them over her back, their straps crossed like bandoleers, and climbed ahead of me to the top….

Back at last.

The sky was not so cloudless as on our first day up. In arroyos and valleys all the way along the east side of the lake, mist hung in wisps and shrouds like a row of tars in winding sheets tipped for committal to the deep. Through cloud rifts, quicksilver beads fell in showers. White birds, brilliant in the sun, sailed against storm clouds of blue-black and
charcoal. Yet for all the beauty of the scene, we didn't sit, didn't bounce our heels against the ledge, didn't scan the valley for more than a minute. The anticipation of exploring, which we had once thought to prolong for a day, had become an agony.

The bench was as deep as our courtyard was across … maybe thirty
varas
, I thought, gauging one against the length of my arm. Amanda pronounced its depth to be twelve
matl
,
†
making its width thirty on each side. Popocatepetl smouldered sullenly across from us—
next
to us—way up yet just to the right. Straight overhead, from the snow line, thin plumes of waterfalls stepped like cloud ladders down the face of Iztaccihuatl. One chute would stop and disappear, to be relieved by another a little over and farther down—until the last plunged into a cleft of rock ten times our height above us, to re-emerge as a small, calm stream from the thicket directly at our feet.

The only way in was to wade up, ducking under the bushes overarching the stream. The water had been ice not an hour ago, yet the shock we expected did not come. It was not at all cold. We waded swiftly in to our knees and then, to get under the thicket, frog-walked over large smooth stones.

We might so easily have been disappointed. After ten days of frantic anticipation, what place could live up to such feverish visions?

Ixayac could.

So many first impressions we never discussed. The splash and sparkle of water, the shelter and hush, as if from the rasp and rush of breaths—indrawn, checked, endlessly prolonged. Blackberry bushes in bloom, and among them a hummingbird's soft throstling. Tiny frogs creaked, shy yet urgent. From the upper bench down, a fine spray of mist drifted, fog from a cauldron of rainbows. The faintest echo whispered from the rock wall behind the waterfall—did she murmur something, a word … did I? We straightened, searched each other's eyes in disbelief. A minute ago we had been high on the open flank of two great mountains, yet now we crouched, enclosed, in a nest of calm. Ixayac
was
the heart of the earth. It throbbed. Soft as a bird in the palm of god.

Amanda's almond eyes welled for an instant but then she smiled like a maniac, and hugged me hard. I felt the strength in her.

Up on the right was the old
temazcal
. A few grey stones had tumbled from its sides. We set to work restacking them. The largest were too
heavy to lift alone. When we were done the walls came to our shoulders. We plastered the chinks with reddish mud and laid pine boughs across. I streaked her cheek and wheeled away with no hope of outrunning her. By the time she had thoroughly smeared my hair and dragged me into the pool, the sun was barely two palm-widths above the horizon. As soon as Amanda noticed, still wet we started packing up. It was hard to leave.

Just before taking the handholds back down we stopped at the edge and gazed out, like emperors come to a balcony to gratify the fawning multitudes. The mists had burned clear. After the heavy rains, the lake's expanses of blues and greens were hedged at each river mouth with frail blooms of mud. Yet in the pale blue around the city, its floating gardens still gleamed an emerald green. The air was clearer than ever, and I was sure I could see the cathedral tower, and even the scaffolding of the corrupt construction works that so scandalized Abuelo and never seemed to cease.