Bride of the Baja (24 page)

When he began undoing the buttons of her riding dress, she looked up at him, all at once aware of men talking nearby and, farther away, the sounds of soldiers marching. In the distance she heard a blacksmith's hammer clang on an anvil.

"Here?" she asked. "Now?"

"Here," he told her. "Now."

When they were both naked on the bed, he gathered her into his arms, kissing and caressing her until she arched feverishly to meet him. Afterward she clung to him, wanting to hold him forever.

"You must never leave me," she whispered. "I couldn't bear to have you gone."

He didn't answer. His eyes were closed, and she tenderly kissed his eyelids. Suddenly she jumped.

"Esteban," she said and he opened his eyes. "That spider." She nodded to the wall, where the spider had crawled to within a few inches of the white flesh of her leg.

Esteban reached across her body and with his thumb ground the spider against the wall. When he took his thumb away Alitha saw a black smear on the adobe. She clung to him, trying to recapture the contentment she had felt only a few minutes before, but she could not.

A week later Alitha was at the rail of the Spanish brig
Princesca
looking across the blue waters of the Sea of Cortes. Esteban came to stand beside her.

"You're very quiet today, my love," he said. "You stare over the waters as though you could already see San Blas or even Mexico City itself."

"This is the first ship I've been aboard since the
Flying Yankee
. I was remembering our voyage around the Horn and the storm. I was thinking of my father."

Esteban covered her hand with his and she leaned against him.

"Oh, Esteban," she said, "when I was a girl, I thought I'd live forever. Each day seemed a lifetime, and a week was an eternity. Now, after what happened to the
Yankee
, I know life can be so—so fleeting."

"That's why we must live every day to the fullest. Why we must take the pleasures of this world where and when we find them. Who knows what lies beyond?"

"You don't believe in eternal life? That the body may die but the soul lives on?"

"Life eternal? Who knows? But it is not like you to be so gloomy, my Alitha. You usually greet even the dreariest of days with a smile as bright as the sun above. Besides, the worst of our journey is over. Loreto and Baja are behind us, San Blas and Guadalajara and Mexico lie ahead."

"I liked your friend
Coronel
Morales." She hesitated, wondering if talking about the
coronel
would remind Esteban of the unpleasantness on the day they'd arrived. She hoped it wouldn't. "He seems such a gentleman for a soldier."

"Did Manuel tell you that he always wanted to be a botanist when he was young? As a boy, he avidly collected all the varieties of plants growing near his home in Cordoba. It is strange, the turns our lives take. Now he commands one of the most important yet Godforsaken outposts of New Spain."

Esteban leaned over the rail, watching the wake of the ship behind them. "Manuel told me what he knew of conditions in Mexico. The Spanish viceroy, Juan Ruiz de Apodaca, is in control, praise be to God, though a certain General Guerrero still leads a band of revolutionaries in the southern part of the country. The last word Manuel had from the capital was that the viceroy was sending his best general, Auguste de Iturbide, to the south to quell the revolt."

"I know there have been uprisings in Mexico for years. Why, Esteban? Why do these men revolt? Isn't there enough death as it is?"

"Most of them are opportunists attempting to create a place for themselves in the sun. They all have their endless lists of grievances, together with grandiose plans to resolve them. There is too much wealth in the hands of a few, they say, while the great masses of the people are poor. Prices are too high, some complain, while others claim there is little in the way of education for the young. Still others decry the great power of the priests, pointing out, truthfully, that the church owns half of all the land in the country. And certainly the Inquisition left wounds that have not yet healed. We had a saying in Spain that one arrested by the Inquisition may not be burned alive but he will assuredly be scorched."

"My father didn't encourage me to be interested in politics. I'm not well informed."

"That is no failing, my Alitha. Women have not the minds for it. In politics the more things change, the more they remain the same. As for myself, I only want to help save my homeland, my California. I'm a royalist, yes, and a Spaniard, of course, but California is first in my heart of hearts. Someday California will be independent, freed from Spain. I hope I live to see that glorious day."

Alitha glanced at him but decided not to argue. In Esteban's view women weren't meant to think. She looked out over the water. "Esteban," she said, "is that San Blas? We seem to be sailing for the mouth of a river."

"Yes, at last." He put his arm around her shoulders and drew her to him. "San Blas! Mexico!"

Esteban sounded, she thought, as though he had found the promised land after years of wandering in the desert. The air was humid as they sailed into the bay of San Blas, and perspiration beaded their foreheads. In the low-lying country behind the town, Alitha saw a forest of broad-leafed trees and, farther to the east, mountains. These weren't the barren hills of Baja but towering, tree-covered slopes.

"The South Seas must be like this," Alitha said. "The palms, the thatched huts on the sandy beach." And the Sandwich Islands must look like this, too, she thought with a sudden pang. How strange to think that she might never see Thomas again.

After docking alongside a wharf they waited on board while Indians unloaded the
Princesa.

"Those men are
cargadores
," Esteban told her. "As you can see, they use straps to carry everything and anything on their backs. They carry as much as three hundred pounds, walking or trotting great distances. In the cities you often meet a
cargadore
with a man or woman seated in a chair on his back."

"The Indians here in Mexico seem so gentle, so quiet, as though they've endured without complaining for hundreds of years and will endure for hundreds more."

"They weren't always so. In the ancient days before the Spanish conqueror Cortes came, they were warlike, fighting not so much for land or gold or glory but to capture victims for their blood-lusting gods. They painted their prisoners blue before taking them to a sacrificial pyramid, where they stretched them across a stone altar. A priest with trailing hair matted with gore, wearing a bizarre costume and wielding a stone knife, would rip open the victim's chest, plunge his hand inside, and wrench out the man's heart which he threw, still pulsing and warm, into a stone urn on the altar."

"How horrible!"

"If the great Cortes accomplished nothing else, he brought Christianity to Mexico to take the place of the Indians' savage paganism, their worship of idols, their cannibalism. So you can understand why I asked you to remove that charm of yours from around your neck."

Alitha said nothing. How could a stone carved in the shape of a fish have anything to do with human sacrifices hundreds of years ago? Besides, hadn't the first Christians used the fish as their symbol?

Why was Esteban constantly finding fault with what she said and did? He knew she was an American, not a Spaniard, and yet he seemed to expect that she act like a senorita. Even if she wished to she could not, because she didn't know all the customs, the manners of Spanish women. And though she wanted to please Esteban, she was determined to remain herself.

As soon as their horses and supplies were unloaded from the
Princesa
, they made preparations to leave San Blas.

"This climate is unhealthy for those of us who aren't used to it," Esteban said. "In San Blas we are in the tierra caliente, the hot country, far south of the Tropic of Cancer, Many men die here of yellow fever."

They struggled through swamps and tropical forests, where snakes slithered away into the high grass, where vines hung from rubber and mahogany trees. The forest was a lush green, for the summer rainy season was not yet over, although, except for an occasional shower, they hadn't seen rain since they had left Loreto.

On their second night out of San Blas, they camped on the top of a low hill, covering themselves with netting to ward off the flies and mosquitoes. Alitha woke abruptly, sitting bolt upright. Men were shouting nearby, the horses stomping and whinnying shrilly. She heard the terrible sound of an animal in pain. One of the horses? Lanterns bobbed among the trees. Esteban, she saw, was gone, his petate empty. A shot cracked a short distance away. A man called out in the night. She heard another shot and the thud of horses' hooves.

Throwing a shawl over her shoulders, she ran to the still-glowing campfire, where she found one of the vaqueros standing with his musket across his arm.

“
Que epasa
?" she asked him. "What's happening?"

"Jaguar," he said.

The
vaquero
told her that the jaguar had killed one of the horses, and now the other men were hunting the night-prowling animals. He was armed because of that and because in San Blas they had been warned of marauding bandits, who were sometimes the remnants of revolutionary bands, along the route to Mexico City.

Alitha sat on the ground beside the fire and waited.
Sometime later she heard another shot in the distance, followed by silence. After what seemed an eternity she again heard hoofbeats. She stood up, staring into the darkness, and a few minutes later Esteban and the rest of the men rode into camp.

Esteban disappeared for a moment and returned with a bottle. After drinking deeply he gave it to the man next to him, and the liquor was passed from hand to hand until it returned to Esteban, who emptied the bottle and hurled it into the dark night.

He walked past Alitha, turning and motioning her to follow him. When they reached their petates, he said brusquely, "Take off your gown."

She let her shawl drop to the ground but hesitated an instant before pulling her nightgown over her head.

"Did you kill the jaguar?" she asked.

"Would I not have brought him back to the camp as a trophy if I had?"

He took off his clothes and knelt over her, his hands rough on her breasts. Still kneeling, he moved higher along her body and she felt his hands bringing her breasts together to imprison his sex between them. Her breathing quickened. He hunched still higher until his knees straddled her shoulders. She felt something smooth and warm touch her cheek. Instinctively she turned her head away.

"What are you doing?" she whispered fearfully.

"Take me into your mouth," he said.

"I can't. Oh, Esteban, I can't. Don't ask me to."

"You will do as you are told."

He took her head in his hands, and though she twisted away from him, he turned and lifted her head until her lips pressed against his sex. With her hands clenched into fists at her sides, her nails biting into her palms, and with tears scalding her eyes, she opened her mouth, gagging.

The next morning the sky was blue and the sun bright as they climbed from the swampy lowlands into the cool, dry air of the mountains. Esteban rode ahead as always with Alitha behind him. She stared silently ahead. Everything will be all right once we get to Mexico City, she told herself. Look, even the weather improves as we go into the mountains.

Two days later clouds gathered in the west, and by evening she felt the first drops of rain on her face. The storm went on day after day, night after night, the rain heavy and unrelenting. When at last they entered Mexico City in the cold rain, the men huddled in their scrapes and Alitha rode bundled in her cloak. The stone-paved streets of the city were slick, the buildings along their route a blur. She had never been more miserable.

                                          CHAPTER SIXTEEN

Alitha woke early , as she had every morning since arriving in Mexico City, to the shrill cries of the street peddlers.

"
Haycebor

" Mantequilla!"

"Cecina buena!"

The last she'd just learned to translate. Good salt beef. She sat up in bed and looked toward the window.

Alitha smoothed the coverlet and sighed. She was alone in the massive bed with the ornate gilt headboard. Esteban had made it clear that here in Mexico City they wouldn't share a bedroom.

"That does not mean you won't find me in your bed,
mi corazon
, my heart, but there are certain customs to be observed."

"Won't they know that I—that we ... ?" she had asked.

Esteban had thrown back his head and laughed. "Of a certainty everyone will know you are my
amante
, but still we shall abide by the ways of my people, as we did in
mi casa
. You are a senorita and must seem to sleep alone."