Hunger's Brides (41 page)

“Why don't you go down to Xochitl now.”

I wasn't angry. I felt the words coming from a long way away, from a
desolate place. All my confusion and resentment and hurt and envy were a heaviness pulling, sagging down in me, at my guts and lungs and heart.

“Go on. I'll stay for a while. No. I want to. Be by myself, for a little while. Don't worry. Two palms,” I said, and smiled weakly. It felt as if my lips were sliding off my face. And the truth was, she looked as I felt. Stricken. My twin. Her face pale as my white heart.

I slipped my shift back over my head while she dressed, then went with her to the edge of the bench and the holds. We stood a minute looking out over the city on the lake.

As I watched from above she started silently down, then hesitated at the bottom. She looked up. “Ixpetz. I'm so sorry.” She said it too quietly to hear, but I could tell from her lips, from her chin, its edges crumpled like a leaf.

When I was sure she'd really gone I slipped the satchel strap over my shoulder and made my way to the upper bench. My limbs were so weak with trembling I was afraid I might slip. I sat for a while in the mist beside the water jet. I spread the contents of my satchel out. The cornflowers and agave strips for crowns. The
Metamorphoses
, green ribbons sprouting out of Proverbs.

I watched the falcons returning after another hunt. This marvel of falcon flight, such slender, trembling wings were these, to marshal the wildest legions of the air, to plummet as each wing folds itself as neatly as a letter. I listened to their voices, for what they might tell, but they had nothing to say that I could ever decipher. Through what mysteries had Egypt made the falcon the god of silence? Who was this child of Isis, and what mysteries did its silence hold, this speaker of such wild speech? Did the truth dwell in the pauses between its cries, as with the trout in the pool? Or between these echoes reverberating now—like blows from a shield—off rock and water. And what was the exultation in that throat and those wings but the talent of flight that resolves itself like a target in the archer's eye?

I wanted to run, to call after Amanda, but to say what?—that they cry after the knowledge of it, with the sudden wild joy of it, this talent in their wings. To know at last what those great bows are shaped for.
In vain the nets are spread for them
, before their sight, in those clear eyes. To have found the talent that will not betray them, never to surrender it again, and know to what high places they are bound.

I had wanted visions, I had wanted us to pant on jimsonweed like water dogs, like walking fish—for us to lie gasping on the bank, and wake as tigers—I had wanted to see into everything, all the mysteries and silences. But now something had slid, something had smashed. We hadn't stopped the Nile together, but we had stopped the running. I believe I already sensed this but refused to see the import of what I'd done. I spent the next month, then the next years explaining it away, why the year of running had stopped. And each time I did this, it felt a little worse. I had scratched the jade.

A
ll the way down from Ixayac, I thought of Abuelo, how badly I needed to hear his voice, to feel his big knobbly hand on my shoulder, his forehead against mine. Just to talk, as we used to, and to ask him to help me to understand friendship, and how and if and why it must end; to help me know my talent and my destiny, for I had come to know that they were not separate, these riddles and my life. While my life was rich and I had discovered a lot, if only I knew more, looked harder, opened my eyes still wider, I might yet see the wonder of secret meanings woven into everything, every word and gesture. This was Pandora, this was the universal gift.

I came in through the main portal. At the end of the passageway into the courtyard my steps faltered, stopped. The black mastiff crouched before the library door. His baleful yellow eyes fastened onto mine as I stepped over him. I could feel his breath on my ankles as I stopped short of the doorway and leaned in to call to Abuelo. Seeing the dog should have served as warning. I was caught completely off guard.

Standing behind Grandfather's chair and stooped indulgently to read what Abuelo was writing at his desk was lance-captain Diego Ruiz Lozano. Casually he turned—both of them turned—at my call. His face was utterly bare of the slightest guilt or gloating. Abuelo's face, though, fell, as he read the hurt and shock in mine.

Who was this popinjay in uniform, that he should stand in that library as if born to it, when I had only stopped at its threshold like a church beggar. I had read half the books
in
there. Abuelo opened his mouth to speak. Stepping back I turned, trod upon the mastiff's paw—a yelp, a bark of fury, Diego roaring at the dog—Abuelo calling
Angel, wait
—

My satchel thudded to the ground. I ran through the courtyard, past the well, the firepit, to my room, stopped at the door—turned back and ran furiously up the watchtower steps. And then I had nowhere left to run. I was trapped. Trapped by these mountains, this tower, trapped by this place. I turned away. My eyes went past the threads of smoke rising over the red roofs of the town, past the vegetable plots to the west—dust hanging like a shower of gold in the sun—past the orchards to the
north—and finding peace in none of it. I collapsed sobbing fury in the shadow of the wall.

A few minutes or an hour passed, and hearing him labouring wheezily up the steps I dried my cheeks on my sleeve. Quietly he set the green rabbit satchel next to me on the yoke of the cannon carriage and leaned awkwardly between one wheel and the barrel to catch his breath.

“Angelina, I am sorry about this,” he began. “A painful moment. For both of us….” He seemed at a loss, and to see him struggle to apologize, I felt worse than ever. Because
I
should be the one.

“Abuelo, no—how could I blame you for wanting company?—but
Diego.”
He held up a hand to stop me. Maybe he would have said, then, exactly why the moment was particularly painful for him: for what Diego had been watching him sign was a promissory note for a hundred pesos. But I didn't let Abuelo finish. It was all tumbling out of me now in a rush. Not directly about Ixayac but about turtles and trout, about the falcons and how it felt to watch and hear them call. At first he was mystified, then stood, his hands hanging down helplessly, as I mumbled and rambled on about Amanda and friendship, about my selfishness and all my fury at the riddles I could never quite solve.

Did he see? But no, how could anybody understand any of it. Or me. Or my fears that I might do something truly terrible one day. His frown uncreased at this and he opened wide his arms. He patted my back as I cried against his belly for a while, blotching his shirt and the lacings of his doublet. Even then I did not think of what had happened at Ixayac as anything more than a horrible failure.

“How odd,” Abuelo said, “that you should be speaking to me of falcons.” He pulled me up to sit on the warm cannon barrel next to him.

“Did you know that in Andalusía hunting hawks were a kind of universal madness when I was your age? It was … either 1599 or 1600 …
y esas malditas escopetas
†
had not yet ruined the hunting. In the streets of the towns anyone of substance had a hawk on his wrist—or hers. The Moors were the greatest masters, in hawking as in so many matters. Yes exactly, Angelina, in mathematics, too. Once on the banks of the Guadalquivir I held a gyrfalcon on my wrist.
Y te lo juro, Angel
, the power in that bird's talons could have crushed my arm. It came into my mind then that I had only to remove its leather hood to have it carry me—as if unfurling a sail—off across the Gulf, right over Cadiz, and home to Tangiers. For this was a falcon of
Africa
. What a moment that was. Of
course a gyrfalcon was not for children, or even commoners. In many countries it was then an offence for anyone less than a king to own one. And if a child might possess nothing more than a kestrel, what bird, do you think, was exclusive to an emperor?

“An eagle?”

“An eagle—
exacto
. Or a vulture, though I know of no emperor who kept a vulture. But for hunting there is nothing like a falcon. Marco Polo's friend the Emperor of Cathay never went on a hunt with fewer than
ten thousand falconers
. What do you think of that?” he said, giving my knee a jocular tap. “Eh? Well yes, as you say … I've always thought ten thousand a lot myself. But you know, Pope Leo
†
was just as mad for falcons, as was only natural for one of his noble ancestry. And during his time, it is said, bishops all across Christendom wrote countless letters of admonishment: nuns were not to disrupt Mass—or come to confession either—with their falcons and bells. Letters uniformly ignored, for the ladies knew perfectly well that no mere bishop would stand against the Pope on this subject. Nun-falconers, Angelina. Imagine that!”

His arm around my shoulders, we sat silently for a moment watching the sun slump behind the hills, scanning the sky with the eyes of hawks. “And yours, Juanita, what kind were they, these five?” I didn't know what kind. I supposed there were a lot?

“A lot?—all
kinds
. Lanners, gyrfalcons, peregrines. And merlins—very game for their size. I have heard of them attacking even herons. There was a book …
Dios mio
, I'd almost forgotten.
El libro de la caza…
. The favourite book of all my boyhood after that day on the riverbank. Don Pedro López de Ayala wrote it out in a Lisbon prison after the fiasco at Aljubarrota. His and King Frederick's were the two greatest masterpieces ever drafted on the art of the falconers.”

He glanced at me to see if the topic of books might still be a painful one, then rose stiffly to his feet, putting a hand to the small of his back. “And how is it, I ask myself, that I have neither of them now? Then you could have found for me an engraving, shown me these falcons of yours. You know, Angel, you were right after all. It is high time I made a little trip to Mexico City.”

My stomach dropped. No, no, he assured me, he'd been meaning to go for some time, but I couldn't persuade myself that he was not going just for me. I felt the gentle yoke of his arm across my shoulders….
Not now
. To be apart from him was the last thing I wanted. Not even at the
thought of him pulling into the courtyard with a whole wagonload of books. This grand notion only came briefly to me the next morning anyway, as I watched the wagon my grandfather drove disappearing up the road. For the first in all the times I had watched him leave, he was not on horseback.

What I was thinking now was
war
. Now—with Abuelo away. If a preening varlet in
charreteras
†
—who I felt sure had hardly finished a book in his life—could just stroll into our library, now was very much the time. Grandfather would not be here to see me at my worst and be ashamed for me. Once I hit upon my strategy, I steeled myself to act very badly indeed.

Our perennial dinner guest was not remotely like my father, had none of the qualities I might envy him on my father's part. Neither vital nor mysterious, not noble, nor in any discernible way intelligent. So it had not been long before I was back reading at the table. Isabel gave no sign of minding. It was not that she had grown so very flexible in her ideas of etiquette, however; it was that he was no longer quite a guest. He sat on my right, while on my left Abuelo would sit hunched at what I thought of as the head of the table. Very occasionally my grandfather might speak with Diego on some military question, rumours of a disturbance or unrest at one end of the territory or other. The lance-captain replied sparingly, as though invested with a chaste secret, or with what struck not just me but Abuelo too, I suspected, as an affectation of modesty.

Once Abuelo left for Mexico hostilities got underway. At supper Josefa fairly glistened in Diego's company, as she had ever since their return from Chalco—she and María both, like porcelain, though I had not yet found out why, eyes glazed, they so brightly basked in our guest's
proximidad varonil
,
†
in the radiant kiln of his smile. At least his teeth were straight. And he did have a thick head of wavy hair, almost black. The beard was of a rich oily black like a Moor's. I knew little of men's grooming, but those sweeping moustaches had always seemed not so much fashionable as the very locus of his vanity. Then there was the dashing uniform my sisters made so much of. Did no one notice him spilling food on it? Compared to the designs of Jacobi Topf, what a paltry thing that uniform was—all cloth, clusters and buttons. Less like a fighting soldier's armour than a court juggler's motley. As different as a pauldron was from an epaulette. And he may very well have danced
splendidly, as Josefa insisted, but I'd have liked Amanda's opinion before conceding even that.