Daughters of Babylon (6 page)

He heard a trill of laughter, lighter and clearer than the rest, and his mind was made up. This opportunity would never come again; he took a step forward. To spy on women, possibly nobles . . . he took a second step. Thinking of the stories he could bring home that would rival Benicio’s, he crouched and scampered. If the stars were truly in his favour, it would be a bathing hut . . . he scuttled the remaining distance to the open window.

“This is where Grandfather and
La Dangereuse
used to meet. He had
chatilliontes
built specially for the two of them wherever they lived.”

“Well, she wouldn’t be impressed with the state of this one. We need to light a bonfire, burn all this rubbish. Look at the droppings!”

Arturo curled his fingers around the window ledge and slowly raised his head, high enough to observe two women criss-crossing his field of vision. They carted nets and baskets at arm’s length and tossed them with noises of disgust through the open door that faced the castle. The shorter woman was plump with a sweaty pale face; a white linen touret covered her hair and forehead. The taller one, who’d remarked on the turds, wore a dark blue velvet gown and a circlet of pearls that held a sky blue veil. Ladies of the court, both of them—he was sure of it.

The first voice he’d heard spoke up again, but he heard no laughter in it now.

“It isn’t just the state of things here, Jocelyne, it’s everything. If
Grand-père
were alive, his rage alone would light bonfires. These lands are mine. They were willed to me by Father the day he died, en route to Compostelle. It was Good Friday, the day of Our Lord’s death. I don’t care if St. Peter himself comes down to argue canonical law with me. I know my heart’s truth.”

“Milady,” said the woman in pearls. “It would be judicious, if I may say so, not to call down the wrath of Paradise at a time like this.”

“Then tell me, on what occasion should we call down the wrath of Heaven, if not at times like these? The Holy Father has forbidden the people of Aquitaine from taking the sacraments, and now they fear for their souls and the souls of their families. Why? Because the Pope and my husband snort and paw the ground like bulls in rut and cannot be made to listen to reason.”

“But they have divine authority, Madame,” said the fat, sweaty woman who reminded Arturo of his maiden aunt Constanza.

“And what do I have, Marie-Therèse? Is my authority not equally divine?”

And with those words, she came into view, centered in the window frame, profiled toward the sunrise; and the first thing Arturo saw—no, felt—was dazzlement. He had never seen hair that shimmered in currents of scarlet and gold, nor curls that tumbled luxuriant to the waist without a cord or ribbon to bind them. She was lithe and tall and proportioned in a way that men noticed—in a way, he suspected, that everyone noticed. Her wool gown of mulberry with tight sleeves and bodice was the least adorned of the three women, and yet he would have known—knew already—that he looked upon a queen.

The intersection of Camino de Obregón
and Carretera 14A, Veracruz, Mexico,
LATE SUMMER, 1972

The turn signals of the sputtering, pumpkin orange Volkswagen camper never did reveal whether the driver intended to turn south toward the Delgado de Obregón sugarcane plantation or north toward the village of Las Cuevas. Twelve yards from the T-crossing, the vehicle jerked hard and threw the front left wheel into a pothole obviously marked with a fresh palm frond. The sudden stop caused the van’s suspension to judder, the front grille to hiss white steam. Plumes of black smoke coughed out of the exhaust, and as if the spectacle were not embarrassing enough, the cream-coloured roof extension popped up like a jack-in-the-box lid. The Nagual Lupo Sanchez half-expected a chuckle-headed clown to stick his woolly head through the canvas and shout, “Hello, boys and girls, welcome to wicky-wacky whozits!”

Lupo and the three
brujas
slowed their pace, stopped, and turned, as one, toward the wheezing van, maintaining the time-honoured Indian tradition of somber to the point of mournful non-expression. Delia gave off knitting the turquoise Phentex baby blanket and placed two hands on her bulging belly. Tita, who towered behind the others, had already worked out where and how she might obtain the best spare parts and what, given the US plates—Philadelphia, she was fairly sure—she might charge for labour.

The youngest and most petite witch stood in front of Lupo and muttered something under her breath.

“
Qué dices
?” he said, from behind her right shoulder.

Malvine LaVendrye jackknifed forward at the waist, removed a
huarache
sandal from her small high-arched foot, and shook out a nonexistent pebble. “I said,” she said, pulling up a piece of horizon as she rose, “that Mictlantecuhtli and Cihuatl have arrived.”

Lupo scratched the itch underneath his sombrero that always acted up when this particular
bruja
expressed herself. “There’s a she in that thing?”

“Oh, yes.”

Sure enough, although only a man had been visible through the windshield, both front doors opened, and from the passenger side stepped a leggy young blonde in khaki shorts and lavender top. She was wiping her mouth across the back of her forearm in a way that explained why a driver with perfect visibility would swerve into a pothole big as a rain barrel.

“Dely, Tita, stay here,” Lupo said. “The baby does not need a close encounter with whatever these gringos are smoking, although personally, Malvine, I think that the god of death would carry less fat around the middle.” He turned and patted Delia’s tummy. “Rest, both of you, if you need to.” He cupped a hand around Malvine’s upper arm. “We’ll approach as
indios bobos
. Are you willing to let me do the talking?”

The third witch did not reply. She had caved in her chest and curled her shoulders. She was chewing on a pinky cuticle with her hand twisted backward, her normally bright gaze dull as tin centavos. She had already switched.

The couple had taken note of their Indian audience, half of them barefoot, one hugely pregnant, but as they had no tow truck or other visible means of assistance—looked, in fact, as though they’d never seen a wheeled vehicle—the couple’s interest was short-lived. The driver, sweat staining his U Penn T-shirt to riverine swathes of gray, cared more, at the moment, about damage to the wheel well. His passenger, holding waist-length hair the colour of corn silk off the back of her neck while fanning away flies, craved cherry cola. Neither noticed that two of the Mexicans were approaching.

Lupo figured the man to be in his mid-to-late forties, a few years younger than himself. Judging by his attire, a professor, tenured, probably on sabbatical; he had the melted candle shape of one who has forgotten what it’s like to fear joblessness. The girl was the shy side of twenty, if that, and from what he’d witnessed so far, Lupo guessed she was his—what did they call it?—research assistant. Yeah. Good name. Pairs like them were showing up all over rural Mexico these days.

There was no point in asking Malvine in her current state why she’d associated these two with the god and goddess of the Aztec underworld, nor in reminding her, jokingly, that she carried not a drop of Mixtec blood or religosity in her veins. What her twenty-two-year-old veins had known and survived was far more destructive.

The nagual had found Malvine three years ago, while on business in Mexico City. He’d been strolling through the Hotel Intercontinental, idly checking phone booths, as was his habit, for loose change and found her huddled on the floor inside a booth, trembling as if half frozen. She wore black leather hot pants and a studded denim jacket; she was hugging her matchstick legs and frothing at the mouth, her nostrils ringed with white powder like a pair of mini-
churros
. Lupo knelt to check her pulse and pull back her eyelids and knowing an overdose when he saw one, rose to call Security. But when he started to walk away, she grabbed his ankle, pulled herself closer, and clamped her teeth into his calf.

“
Chingada,
what the fuck?!”

He tried to shake her off, but she dug her teeth in and clung more tightly, arms wrapped around his shin as if he were the mast of a sinking ship. While he dragged his leg that was sure to draw blood once she broke through the fabric, she slid on red and yellow vinyl platform shoes in a squat that revealed far more inner curvature than strangers ought to see.

He glanced around the pillared lobby in search of help, but no one seemed to notice his predicament. Tourists draped in gold and jewels fussed with lap dogs wearing ribbons in their fur; businessmen with grim expressions and alligator briefcases criss-crossed the marble expanse as though Lupo and the spiky-haired rat hanging from his pantleg did not exist.

And so he yelled. It was a single word, nonsensical, and delivered with the full intentionality and momentum of a plank across the side of his captor’s head. She immediately released her teeth from his calf, but then she howled. Hers too was a single sound, nonsensical. Unlike Lupo’s, however, it went on and on, a screeching barbed wire tangle of noise that ripped the top layer of cells from his ear drums and swarmed his mind with images of inbred mountain haunts where werewolves stalked and succubi slurped husbands’ souls, and children died stillborn from hearing laments that they were not wanted; and with each escalating, crescendoed beat of her cry, another head in the lobby turned. By the time her lungs, which surely had the capacity and strength of a whale pod, emptied, every businessman, every hotel employee, every man, woman, and be-ribboned frou-frou dog was staring at them.

Her open palms dropped to the floor. She arched her back in a languid feline stretch, held the pose and then released it with a sudden exhalation. She looked up at him with huge black pupils ringed in crystal blue, moved her pouty bow lips in and out like a guppy. That she was engaging in well-practiced theatrics he had no doubt, but there was something in the girl’s eyes, some optic trick of light that emanated like a spray of needles from an impenetrable center that was so precise, so infrangible he could have hung from a single beam and done chin-ups.

La Pantera Negra had told him such skills existed, but they were rare. She herself had never seen them, except in dreaming awake. Entire empires rose, thrived, and crumbled without a single sighting. These awarenesses, or assemblages of perception, crept along the surface of the earth unclaimed, like feral children, as castaways from prior suns, from lineages long ago self-destroyed.

Two security guards were swaggering toward them, one slapping a billy cub into his palm, the other resting his hand on an enormous holstered pistol. Lupo sized up the variables. The girl was young and pretty; she was unaccompanied and vulnerable. Addictions ruled her. To be stoned in public in Mexico City proved she was undisciplined, arrogant, maybe just stupid. The eagerness of the goons in cobalt blue to dispense their form of law enforcement showed itself in the shine of saliva on their lower lips.

Lupo could do the manly thing, if nothing else, and insist she had not troubled him. He’d startled her; she was clearly ill; her family must be worried to death. There was also the remote possibility—though it was infinitesimal—that this little
ratoncita
was the answer to a long-standing nagual conundrum. He had about 1.25 seconds to make up his mind. Luckily, he’d dressed that day in chinos, a respectable dark brown sports jacket, and white dress shirt.

With a nod to the guards, he squatted and picked up the scrawny, trembling woman by the shoulders and hoisted her to a standing wobble, murmuring stage whispers along the lines of, “My daughter, my poor sweet daughter, what have you done to yourself now?”

Surprise crossed her face, then suspicion. He wondered if this time she would chow down on his neck. But she did not bite again, and with a few well-placed words and gestures, techniques he’d learned from La Pantera Negra, he persuaded the security guards that he was the girl’s long-suffering father from Guadalajara, widowed, doing his best as a modest importer/exporter. He even burst into tears of gratitude when the hotel concierge insisted on covering the cab fare as the distraught
papacito
had left his wallet at home. (That last bit was upstaging for his own amusement, but the Intercontinental was a huge chain. They could afford it.)

Malvine LaVendrye, though Mexican born, turned out to be descended from the French bluebloods who accompanied Emperor Maximilian and his mad wife Carlota to Mexico in the nineteenth century. Estranged from her son-worshipping family of lawyers, doctors and engineers, she returned with Lupo to Las Cuevas where she cleaned up her drug habit, absorbed the ways of nagual with a speed and efficiency that were probably aided by genetic quirks, and became his third witch.

Lupo placed a protective hand on the shoulder of his companion, who was clearly feeble-minded, and said in perfect English to the man and woman crouched at the Volkswagen camper’s front wheel, “Could we be of assistance?”

Atlantic Pyrénées,
Southern France,
PRESENT DAY

Silvina Kestral looked up at the place she’d be calling home for the next few weeks or months—she didn’t know how long—while Vivian Lansdowne’s exuberant descriptions ran through her mind in a lusty Scottish brogue.

The house stands on a small rise, like the king of its own mountain, if you can picture a king of gray mottled stone with eyes of two front windows, tilting, strained and lazy from centuries of Pyrennean turmoil. He has a long narrow nose door painted dark teal—a colour that in the proper light, brightens to cyan, that shade we adore on a peacock’s tail. He has a high, second story forehead attic with a porthole, where a monarch might be expected to cram the stores of his massive intellect, and from which, when the mood suits him, he might gaze out upon his vast holdings with a singular and divine third eye. Now my king also enjoys the common touch—he wears no crown, only the red-tiled hunting cap roof you see everywhere in Languedoc, set at a severe yet jaunty angle, adorned with a stove-pipe chimney that sends smoky plumage across the orchards toward St. Jacques de la Rivière. I cannot wait for you to see it!