Marco and the Devil's Bargain (4 page)

“
All the time, lieutenant. I have land, cattle, sheep, goats and a wife most dear, and—”

“
Children?”

“
Alas, no, or perhaps that is a good thing right now. Who can say?”

“
When some other poor lieutenant or sergeant comes after me and takes these miserable troops, how will you manage?”

Marco drank deep and then smiled. “As we always have!” He stood up and went to the window, looking down at Toshua in the courtyard. The Comanche had situated himself as a cat in a room with several doors would. Toshua had found the vantage point from which to survey all entrances, looking from one to the other and back again, his hand light on his lance. Several soldiers stood inside their barracks at the window, not leaving the building. Toshua held them hostage without doing a thing.

“
Lieutenant, we are making little gestures toward the Comanche, whom we defeated two years ago fifty leagues north of Santa Maria. Governor de Anza himself has told me to forge what alliances I can, and I shall do this.”

“
Do you have enough authority?” the lieutenant asked. It was not a challenge, but a genuine question wanting—perhaps even craving—a sensible answer.

“
Out here, I create the authority I need,” Marco said bluntly. “We are too far away to depend upon help, so we make our own laws when we must, and trust Our Celestial Father and His Son. Does that shock your military sense of law and order?”

Lieutenant Roybal shook his head. “I rather think it reassures me.”

Marco sketched a little bow, gratified. “You can write in your ledger that Valle del Sol is well-aware of the dangers it faces and looking to improve the odds.”

“
Claro,
señor.” Roybal closed the ledger. He gestured for Marco to sit again. “There is one thing more. I must warn you that we have an unwelcome guest coming this way.”

“
Who would that be?”

“
La viruela.”

Marco sat down with a thump. “
Dios mio
, smallpox.”

M
arco leaned back in his chair, unable to look the lieutenant in the eyes. The younger man waited for him to regain his composure.

“
We always have this unwelcome guest in our colony, lieutenant,” he said finally, hoping the officer of the crown could not hear his heart racing.
I told Paloma I could protect her from everything but disease
, he thought.
I was a fool to open my mouth
. “This smallpox is different?”

“
It is worse. Those men who dare to trade with the Comanche have been hurrying west, telling tales of whole villages empty of the living and stinking of death.” He shrugged. “
La viruela
might never come to Santa Maria, or it might drop in for a lengthy visit. God alone knows.”

They sat in silence for a moment. Perhaps the lieutenant, young as he was, had his own demons.
La viruela
had never been a respecter of persons.

“
Is there a surgeon or physician in Santa Maria?” Roybal asked. He pushed the decanter toward Marco, who poured himself another glass.

Marco laughed. “A surgeon? Here? We don't even have a barber.”

“
So you have not been inoculated?”

“
I have, actually, and my sister, as well.” Marco sat back, remembering the trip to Santa Fe when he was a young boy, just for that purpose. The other
hacendados
laughed at his father for such an expense, when everything was in God's hands, anyway. Good thing Papa had been of a more scientific bent than his friends. He sighed. “My younger brother, also, but he died from the inoculation.”

“
It happens,” said the lieutenant, with sympathy. He sighed, too, then. “My mother died of the inoculation.” He crossed himself, then blushed, as though officers of the crown were not to mention their mothers. “Maybe someday there will be a better method. Then you have nothing to fear, personally.”

“
I have a wife, that one so dear. I've never noticed any scars on her from
la viruela
, or from inoculation, either.” As he sat there drinking the lieutenant's wine, he was suddenly filled with the greatest urge to ride like a maniac to his sister's hacienda, strip Paloma past her shift, and take a good look at her. God knows he had looked closely at her before, but not for scars.
And do what, you idiot
, he asked himself.
Santa Fe is so far, and how do you know there is a surgeon there with access to enough pox right now to inoculate?

“
What is your advice, lieutenant?”

“
Just this: be on the alert for diseased
indios
. Avoid gatherings. I already advised the useless sergeant here that he kill any
indios
who approach Santa Maria ….” His voice trailed away, and he again appeared suddenly young and uncertain.

“
That would not make Governor de Anza happy, since he has told me to send out peace feelers to the east among the Kwahadi,” Marco reminded him. “Just
how
bad is this particular smallpox?”

“
Reports say it is the kind that leaves dark blood spots under the skin and kills before the pustules actually erupt. No one who has not been inoculated survives this pestilence.”

Marco stood up again and walked to the window. “Lieutenant, I would advise you to draft a letter to be read during each Mass for the next month. Warn about gatherings and any wanderers from the east.” He couldn't face the lieutenant because he suddenly felt so discouraged. “Of course, with ten days before any symptoms set in—if I remember correctly—this will turn us into most suspicious and unkind hosts, if we kill random Indians. I can't advise that.”

“
I am composing just such a message for your priest right now.”

“
Very well. How much time do we have before this unwelcome guest arrives?”

The lieutenant shrugged. “It may never come.”

“
And it may be here tomorrow.” Marco drained the rest of his glass and started for the door. “I have work to do. Good day, Lieutenant Roybal. Remember me to the governor, when next you see him.”

After a few more pleasantries neither man had the heart for, he left, summoning Toshua, which probably relieved the entire garrison. Marco must have been wearing his unease all over his face, because the Comanche wasted not a moment as they rode from Santa Maria to ask what the problem was. Marco's answer didn't so much as alter his expression.

“
From the East, you say?”

“
Your territory, Toshua. Your home.”

“
They threw me out, remember?”

“
Yes, but your people ….”

Toshua's answering stare reminded the
juez
all over again that this man was Kwahadi, and no mere Indian. “Ask your woman if she would lift a hand to help her horrible aunt and uncle in Santa Fe!
She
will understand if I seem not properly concerned about my own people.”

Marco was silent for the remainder of the ride to the Double Cross. As they approached his fortress of a hacienda, he could not help the little lift the first view always gave his heart, no matter what his mood. His pleasure passed quickly this time, as the old, gnawing worry came back, the one he was so certain Paloma had banished forever. It was dreadful enough when Felicia and their twins were dead of
el cólera
and buried before he returned from a brand inspection trip. Now there was Paloma, and she was not here to hold out her arms in welcome. He barely restrained himself from wheeling Buciro about to ride through the darkness to Hacienda Gutierrez, just to see Paloma's lovely face.

He didn't try to hide the groan of anguish that escaped him. Startled and then amazed, Marco bowed his head when Toshua leaned over and placed his hands firmly on Marco's. The Comanche gave them a little shake.

“
Do not fear, señor,” he said. “You are too seasoned here on the edge of Comanchería to borrow trouble from tomorrow.”

“
But Paloma is not with me.” Marco couldn't help it.

“
She is safe at your sister's hacienda.” Toshua patted Marco's hand as though he were a child, and not a man grown, a landowner and officer of the crown.

“
I will ride there tomorrow and bring her back,” Marco said, knowing he sounded stubborn and childish.

Toshua laughed then, a low rumble that commanded Marco's attention because the Comanche never laughed. “While it is true my three wives kicked me from the lodge, I do remember other days when they merely frowned and pouted if I tried to change their plans! Take my advice: Showing up early to a women's gathering will earn you no kisses from Paloma.”

Marco couldn't help his own smile. He sat on Buciro in the gloom of night as the guards on the roof continued their steady pacing and his
mayordomo
closed the gate until morning. Marco's heart was not easy, but Toshua was right.

Why had he shown such weakness to a Comanche,
por dios
? “I should take your advice.”

“
I
would,” Toshua replied. “I seldom give any.”

Still, Marco had trouble setting the guards for the night, then walking around his own compound, as he always did after dinner. He could think only of his wife, and the trouble from the east coming her way. He sat for a long time in his office by the horse barn, just staring at a handful of complaints and a packet of new ordinances and laws that Lieutenant Roybal had handed over with a wry grin of his own before he left.

“
We officers of the crown should have no illusions,” Marco muttered out loud, forgetting that Toshua sat by the fire. When the Comanche looked at him, Marco grabbed up a handful of paper. “If I threw this in the fire, no one would know or care, and the course of the empire would proceed in exactly the same way. What should I do?”

“
You wait two more days, then ride to your sister's hacienda, where
I
am not much wanted.”

It had only been a rhetorical question, but it touched him that someone took him seriously.
So my sister does not like you? Ride there anyway tonight, my friend,
he told himself. He knew he could not ask Toshua to do that, but in the year they had known each other, he had learned to respect the Comanche's instincts.

He left Toshua in the office, already unrolling his bedding by the fireplace. For reasons unknown, he had claimed the office as his sleeping room. Marco looked back at the office, then thought of Toshua in the garrison at Santa Maria. For the first time, he realized that the view from the office commanded all the entrances to the Double Cross. He couldn't help his rueful smile. “My friend, you would know instantly if I tried to leave tonight, eh?” he asked the wind. He decided he wasn't desperate enough to find out what Toshua would do.

He spent a long time on his knees in the chapel, then returned to the kitchen, no easier in his mind. Under his housekeeper Sancha's disapproving eyes, Marco took a bottle of wine from its bed of sawdust in the storeroom.

“
At least take a glass with you,” she said, giving him no chance to sneak away with his vice. She reminded him uncomfortably of earlier, darker days. He dared a look in her eyes and saw no sadness this time. Maybe things weren't as bad as he thought.

He went to the
sala
and sank onto the
banco
against the wall. With a frown in the general direction of the kitchen, he popped the cork and drank from the bottle. Trouble was, tipping his head back put him in a direct line with Paloma's bloody sandals tacked on the wall, testimony of her willingness to walk to a dangerous place to return his dog. After a year, the blood had turned to vague dark splotches, but he knew what it meant. He had married a brave woman. What would she think if she could see him drinking from the bottle in the
sala
?

He turned a little, not wanting such a visible reminder of bravery, not when he was feeling so weak and powerless. “How in the world can I protect you?” he murmured, supremely dissatisfied with himself.

Marco took another swig from the bottle, then looked down in surprise to see Paloma's cat twining around his ankles. Chica had arrived on the premises after Sancha shrieked about a mouse in the pantry. He had seen his lovely wife chatting with Señora Chávez after Mass, and sure enough, soon after there was a kitten from the litter they had originally given to her when their barn cat died. Small world.

Chica had a ball of yarn in her mouth, which she dropped at his feet, a clear indication that the only one tired and discouraged was Marco. He picked it up and tossed it across the
sala
, but Chica only looked at him with that evident disdain of cats, as though wondering why her mistress had ever aligned herself with someone so ignorant as the man swigging from a bottle.

Marco fetched the yarn ball himself, annoyed by the ingratitude of cats. He remembered that when Paloma threw the yarn ball, she always accompanied it with a sound, “Shew!” Feeling supremely silly, he looked around to make sure there were no servants within earshot. “Shew!” he exclaimed, and threw the ball.

The cat returned it promptly and dropped it at his feet again, even as she glanced here and there for the person obviously better at the game than he was.