Air and Fire (40 page)

She was still trying to say the name.

‘It's all right,' he said. ‘I heard you.

‘I understand,' he said.

He thought of the mission church, solid as the land itself, the masonry tinged with pink. He could remember sitting in the town square, beneath an Indian laurel tree. That huge vault of foliage. One of many men, just sitting. Relishing the shade. Father Lutz had offered him a pomegranate. ‘It's from my garden.' He could still taste that fruit, its jewelled pieces sweetened by the volcanic soil in which it had grown. He had stayed in a whitewashed room. Stone floors, the walls bare, the furniture carved from some dark wood he did not know. At dusk he had walked among the palms, beside still waters. He remembered how it had felt to be there. His thoughts seemed blessed. His life became a psalm.

And there would be this advantage: he would not have to lie to her.

She sat behind him, her face turned sideways, one cheek resting between his shoulderblades. At last the sun was dropping through the sky. The heat bore down, a weight upon his head. The air so still that he constantly imagined movement. He was riding into his own tall shadow.

There were lava-fields now, shades of charcoal and maroon. Like raised roads, they curved towards him. This was where the elephant trees put down their roots. Perverse trees, to choose such desolation. Nothing else grew here. From a distance the lava looked smooth, but up close you saw that it was flakes of rock stacked tightly, pages in a book. And each flake sharp as glass; they could slice through boot leather,
horses' hoofs. He let his eye climb towards the mother of the fields. Its slopes striped with lava stains. The shocked blue air above the crater's edge. The last time it erupted had been a century and a half ago. But the air did not forget.

Suzanne was murmuring into his back. He could not understand what she was saying. He supposed it must be French – though even English, in her condition, might not have been intelligible. He had a sudden picture of the inside of her head: a cage of brightly coloured birds, their wings cramped by the bars and weakening, folding around their bodies, as if they were cold. Delirium. There could be no other explanation for the insistent, soothing murmur of her voice. She could have been comforting a child.

Her head slipped sideways, knocked against his elbow. He had to reach behind him with one hand and heave her upright. During the next few hours this would become a habit. One of those habits that you don't remember later. But at the time it's the only thing you know.

The world was turning over. Sky, ground, sky.

He must have been dozing, chin on his chest. Moments above sleep, and moments just below. No clear dividing line. No sense of the difference. Then the rattle of shale and stones, and the mule disappearing from under him.

Blue, brown, blue. Brown. Blue.

He was lying next to Suzanne, tangled in rope, as if he had been delivered to her side by some clumsy angel. The sky had darkened; the day was burning low. He lay still, waiting for pain to start. But his head ached, and one knee. That was it.

He sat up.

‘Suzanne? Are you all right?'

She had grazed her forehead in the fall. Blood slid from a gash above her eyebrow and sank into her hair. He took his shirt-tail, worked to staunch the flow.

They had been riding in the shadow of a wall of rock. To their left the ground dropped away, sharply in some places, to a valley hundreds of feet below. A sunlit plain, strewn with boulders. And, in the distance, mountains. A burnt colour, toasted. He looked up, tried to figure it. The track must have given way. A kind of landslide. But they had not fallen far. Ten feet, at the most. He could only think that the rain must have weakened the ground. Driven wedges into it. Cracked it as cold
water cracks hot glass. They were lucky not to have fallen further. Not to have broken anything. There was no great subtlety about the way death reached for you sometimes. Take his father.

The mule was standing a few yards away. She seemed unharmed. Perplexed too, if a mule could know perplexity. It was in the angle of her jaw, somehow, the gap between her ears. He turned back to Suzanne. And it was then, still smiling at their luck, that he noticed the colour of the soil around her head. He sat quite motionless, all previous astonishment nothing compared to this.

Gold.

A lifetime of winters came tumbling through his memory, as if the rain had seeped down into his mind as well, as if the past itself were crumbling. All the hardships, all the disenchantments. You travelled by foot into unknown country. There were no roads, no guides. You had to carry everything you needed in your hands or on your back: food, clothes, tools. You slept with your head between two stones to cheat the arrows of Indians who might be on your trail. You woke before dawn, your threadbare blanket stiff with frost. You dug holes, washed earth. Pay-dirt, mostly. A diet of snakes and acorns. Unleavened bread that sank a weight in your belly but did not kill the hunger. Tea made from muddy stream-water or dew or melted snow. Loneliness, cold, disease. And so little to show for it. So very little in the way of reward. You felt like those pelican robes the Indians used to wear, Indians who lived on river estuaries, the Gila, the Colorado: feathers on the inside, blood facing out. Life that hard, feelings so raw; all the pain faced outwards. It was enough to break a man. More than enough.

And now this.

Some rain, a landslide; the work of a few moments. And not even his work. He could hardly say that he had found the gold. It had been presented to him.

He squatted down, reached out. It was in large pieces, and in a perfectly smooth, pure state. He could only think that the force of the rain had prised it loose, and that same force had washed the ore away and left the metal free. Some of the grains weighed several ounces; they were closer to nuggets than to grains. It put him in mind of Mariposa gold. One of his father's friends had dug it up. Wilson had held that gold in his hand so long he might have been learning it by heart. His father had been proud of his reverence that day, boasted to his friend that prospecting ran in the family.

That reverence came back to him as his gaze moved up to Suzanne's face. Her lilac mouth, all cracked and bleeding. Her skin as dry as paper. Her green eyes slumbering behind burned lids. But her head crowned in gold, which was the way he had always imagined her, somehow. He remembered times when he believed that he might bewitch her with his stories, that he might talk his way into her heart. He did not come close. Even Valence, in the Hotel La Playa, had seemed humbled for a moment, as if he had been faced not with a question but an emperor. And yet that was what she still longed for, still lacked. Some love to match her own. The kind of devotion that did not waver – like worship with all the distance taken out. Something she could understand, accept, return.

‘Suzanne?' He had a secret for her.

Her eyelids opened.

‘Look.' He showed her the gold. ‘It was here all the time.'

Though her mouth must have hurt her, she found a way to smile. ‘Mr Pharaoh,' she whispered. ‘Very lucky man.'

It would be just the way he had said it would be. The last sunlight angling almost horizontally across the valley. Half the palms in shadow. Half still green, and edged with gold.

‘There, Suzanne,' he said. ‘Look there. Below.'

Her eyes rose above his shoulder. Far-sighted, bloodshot, chalky-green. And one word reached his ears.

‘Down.'

The mule needed no encouragement. Maybe she could already smell the water, imagine the lavish quenching of her thirst. Down they plunged.

It was night when they came to the place. A lake – and yet it had the dimensions of a river. Narrowing in the distance, as if it flowed on from here to the sea. Dark palms leaning inwards, the lake's banks narrowing. And the grass that he had spoken of, sedge grass: tipped in silver, massed like spears or lances – an army at the water's edge.

Kadakaamana.

He turned in the saddle to see her face. Her eyes, still open, stared as if entranced. He saw that they would wither now and die. Her eyes would blow away like leaves. A movement across the iris startled him. But it was only a reflection, the fingers of a palm branch fidgeting. Her lips, though parted, would not speak again.

He heard hoofbeats coming from behind him. He urged his mule
forwards, into the shadow of the palms and out along the grass that sloped down to the water. Once concealed, he let the mule dip her head and drink. He watched the stranger passing, a hunched figure on a pale horse. He waited until the paleness was lost among the trees. The mule's neck arched; she was still drinking. Ripples moved out across an otherwise smooth surface. As if the lake were being peeled.

Under the palms, in that evening stillness, he could feel her against his back. No heart beating, just a warmth that would not last. A weight that would diminish. He slid out of the saddle. Grass beneath his feet after an age of dust and stones. Sweet, yielding grass.

When he reached up for her, she toppled sideways, down into his arms. He carried her to the water's edge. Returning to the mule, he collected his rifle, his pickaxe and his spade, and uncoiled the rope from the saddlebow, the same rope that had bound them together, the same knots that her life, like some contortionist, had slipped. He carried the rope and the tools to where she lay. It was only then, as he kneeled beside her, that he noticed how swollen her ankles were. He unfastened her shoes and eased them slowly off. She would not be needing shoes, in any case. The floors of heaven would be soft. He laid the rifle and the tools lengthways on her body, then he reached beneath her with the rope and pulled it through. She had never weighed much; they would be more than enough to take her down. He folded her arms across her chest. She seemed to be holding his rifle, his pickaxe and his spade for him. They were her charge, in her safe-keeping. Now and for ever. He lifted her again and, stooping among the sedge grass, laid her on the water as if it were a bed and took his hands from under her. She seemed to wait there for a moment. She could have been lying on solid ground. Then, smooth as clouds across the sun, the water moved to cover her. And chattered as she sank. Washed the dirt from her. The dirt of the wrong loves. The dirt of his lack of faith in her. Washed it all away. Wrapped her up in what she had dreamed of. Better than any sheets or arms. Now she would be cared for, honoured, pure.

He lifted his eyes from the place where she had been. The night was still new. Dogs barking, a child's laughter. Stars prickled in a sky that had sent, miraculously, rain.

Use the hours of darkness.

His mind torn loose. Cut from his body, floating, separate. It did not seem to be his own. All he could see were women with their shaved
heads painted white. Sorrow beyond weeping, grief beyond tears. The relentless violence of stones. The mask and cloak of blood.

Use the darkness while it lasted. In the light there would be suffering. Out into the land he rode, the dust and plants still cooling from the day. Out along the tracks that he had put down earlier. Into the desert with the mission bell ringing in the air behind him, a sound as rich and round as fruit.

She's dead. I buried her.

Was it right or wrong, what he had done? It had felt right. It would look wrong. It was her wish, and yet it amounted to a treachery. He had been sent by the French to find her, bring her back. In his faithfulness he had betrayed them. In telling her the truth he would be telling them a lie. But he knew where his loyalties lay. Not with those doomed people standing on the road. Not with them. He was beginning to understand his father. His honesty had its roots in his father's many deceptions; his consideration in his father's utter fecklessness. And yet –

I buried her.

One fact that pulled in two directions. The spirit that divides against itself. Some might argue that he had committed a crime. But crime ran in the family. Especially the kind of crime that had two sides to it, that cut two ways. Look at my father, he would say. Well, I'm my father's son.

He felt her against his back, and turned sharply to see nothing. Other times he felt her slipping and reached behind him. His hand met empty air. But he could not shake her presence. It was as real as the mule was – her cheek against his shoulderblades, her head by his elbow. He saw black water rippling. He saw her eyes float free like leaves. The face they left behind was smooth and mad. There came a time when he no longer dared turn round.

A jackal barked in the distance. One soprano cough, then another. The volcano loomed, a bulk against the sky. He had to keep it on his left. Every once in a while his hand passed almost absent-mindedly across the pouch where he had put the gold. The night grew softer, another presence, warm and close, as if he were lying in bed and a face had lowered over him. Eyes patched with shadows. A needle like a splinter of the moon between his father's fingers. He cried out. The desert took the cry and swallowed it. Towards the end his father had begun to believe in his own punishment. All his misfortunes had been earned. Any apparent fulfilment of a dream was only another persecution in disguise. Hope became a poison to him; he lanced the place inside
himself where it had lived, and drained it out of him like pus.

Wilson lifted his eyes. The day was breaking, wedges of rose and pale-yellow in the eastern skies. He was not fooled by it. There had been another morning once. A morning of sardonic beauty. Dawn on the Natchez Trace, some thirty miles south of Vicksburg. His father up and whistling. One hand in the mane of a stolen chestnut mare, the other on his hip. A fire crackling. A twist of steam above the kettle. They were only a few days into September, but the air had a fall snap to it. The smell of frost's first explorations in scorched summer grass.

And then the trees moved. Gave birth to men with rifles. One man wore a star that made him God. Two others took his father and flung him face-down in the grass.