Daughter of Fortune (2 page)

“I am sure your sister will see that the jewels
become a dowry for you,” said the priest, steering her around a
chuckhole.

She looked at the priest then, her heart opening to
him. Dear Father Efrain. How sure he was that all would turn out
well. He had not known how it was after Papa’s ruin, when the young
man who dealt with matchmakers withdrew their offers, one by
one.

The priest went on looking at her with the belief
that his own goodness was the goodness of others, and she could not
bear to disappoint him. “Father, I am sure you are right,” she
lied, hating herself for deceiving a priest.

She looked closer at Father Efrain, and her smile
was one of genuine affection. He had made himself her protector on
the journey and she was grateful. He strode with enthusiasm among
the rocks and pitfalls of the King’s Highway, nimbly avoiding the
cactus and animal refuse. His hair, neatly shaped into a priestly
tonsure at the start of the journey, was long now and as ragged as
the hem of his blue robe, his face tanned by the sun’s slanting
rays of fall and winter. But he still hummed to himself as he
walked the path of empire, cheerful no matter what condition of
disrepair the empire currently enjoyed.

He belongs here, she thought, and how strange it is,
considering that he is new to this place, too. But he belongs here
and I do not.

She smiled at him. “You know, Father, I have not
plagued you in recent months, but tell me now, when will this
journey end?”

“Soon, my child, soon.”

And he was right, terribly so.

They joined the wagons when the teamsters stopped
the ox-drawn carts for the nooning. Before the wagons had ceased
rolling, Carmen’s cook leaped down, ready to begin the preparation
of beans and tortillas. While Maria and the teamsters ate their
dried beef and hardtack—
carne seca
and
biscoche
—Carmen de Sosa dined on cornmeal tortillas and
sipped wine from a silver cup.

The teamsters passed around their own wine, drinking
from a jug handed from muletenders, drivers, and priests to Maria.
By the time the jug reached her the rim was greasy, but she closed
her eyes and drank. She remembered Mama’s words:
a lady drinks
only from a cup
.

After the midday meal, they proceeded into that
unforgettable afternoon, Maria sitting next to the teamster in the
wagon assigned to her. He was a young man, a year or two older than
she. In six months’ travel, she had learned only that he was the
son of the caravan head, and on his first journey, too. His name
was Miguel. It wasn’t much information, but Maria had overcome
agonies of maidenly shyness to learn even that little about him.
She had never spoken to a man, other than her father and priests.
Only her loneliness had compelled her to go as far as she had in
awkward conversation with Miguel.

Before she drifted off into the half-sleep that
filled most of her long afternoons in the wagon, the teamster
handed her something.

“For you, Señorita,” he said.

She took the metal object he held out to her,
careful not to touch his hand, and turned it over. It was a
mirror.

“Where did you find this?” she asked, amazed at the
boldness of her question. Praise God that the journey was nearly
over. If it went on much longer, she would not recognize herself.
As it was, Mama was probably tossing in her grave over the
forwardness of her youngest child.

The man showed no surprise at her address. He
pointed with his whip to the oxcart ahead.

“I believe it fell out of her wagon.”

It was a joke of sorts between them. The freighter
appropriated items from the de Sosa wagon and squirreled them away
for future use. Maria caught him at it once, and they had laughed.
It was sport that would have mortified her in Mexico City, but here
it was only a small way to alleviate the boredom of their oxcart
journey.

Maria had never accepted anything he’d tried to give
her, though she enjoyed looking over the spoils of his agile
fingers, wondering if Carmen de Sosa in her plenitude ever missed
anything. But this time, instead of just looking and handing it
back, she tucked the mirror in her pocket.

“Are you not going to look at yourself?” Miguel
asked, lazily tickling his whip around the ear of the front right
oxen.

She shook her head. “Not now. After we stop. Then
I’ll give it back.”

She wanted to be alone when she looked at her face.
In the half year’s journey, she had not looked into a mirror, and
she had to be by herself when she surveyed the ruin of her
complexion and the state of her hair. Maria had never been vain,
but she remembered how Mama used to utter little cries of delight
as she brushed Maria’s hair each night before bed, exclaiming over
the copper-gold highlights of the thick auburn hair. It was her one
glory. She had no height to recommend her, an ordinary figure,
freckles sprinkled liberally over her nose, but in the soft light
of evening’s candleglow, her hair used to shimmer around her face
like a nimbus.

Maria sighed, thinking of her mother’s great
silver-backed hairbrush that was probably resting now on a dressing
table belonging to Papa’s lawyers. Her eyes narrowed for a moment
as she remembered the solicitors with their red tape and sealing
wax, then she sighed again and patted the mirror in her pocket. It
was going to take more than six months to become accustomed to
poverty and charity from teamsters.

In late afternoon they paused at the edge of the
meandering Rio del Norte. The freighter cleared his throat and
pointed with his whip.

“Santa Fe,” he said.

Maria shaded her eyes with her hand. She could see
nothing except a series of mountains rising before them to the
north and east. The mission supply caravan had been climbing
steadily for weeks now, from desert to plain to gentle slope, and
she had watched those mountains growing slowly closer each day. She
looked at the freighter, a question in her eyes.

“It is in the foothills below the Sangre de Cristos.
Tomorrow. The next day, perhaps. You will see.”

Sangre de Cristos. The name frightened her. “Why are
they called after the blood of Our Lord?”

“The afternoon sun will turn them red. Watch for
it.”

She nodded, suddenly shy again, remaining silent as
the wagons circled near the riverbank. She jumped down, not waiting
for the freighter to give her a hand, touched her pocket and felt
the smooth edge of the mirror.

Maria looked around, then turned away quickly. The
men had gathered in a small circle by the river to relieve
themselves. Carmen de Sosa sat with her back to the men. She
glanced at Maria, then flicked her eyes away.

A distance away from the river there was a circle of
bushes and a small stand of cottonwoods, testimony to an earlier
path of the river. Maria walked toward it, rubbing the small of her
back. She could relieve herself in the bushes, then rest in the
shade of the trees. Maybe if she gathered the courage, she would
look in the glass and determine if she still bore any resemblance
to the young lady who had begun a journey on the King’s Highway six
months before.

The leader of the caravan had admonished her never
to stray from it, but she was heartily weary of all of them—the
unwashed freighters, the uncomplaining missionaries, the
uncommunicative Carmen de Sosa—tired of their food, their coarse
conversation, the endless journey, but most of all tired to her
very soul of her worry over what awaited her in Santa Fe.

The small grove was shady and cool, a change from
the gathering warmth of the late winter sun. After taking care of
private matters, Maria sat down under one of the cottonwoods and
leaned against the trunk, lifting her heavy woolen skirt, removing
her shoes, and stretching her legs out in front of her. She took
the mirror out of her pocket and gazed into it.

A stranger looked back. Maria blinked. Gone was the
smooth, light pink complexion she had nurtured with buttermilk and
flour paste in Mexico City. She was as brown as an Indian. And
dirty. So dirty. She rubbed her face, appalled at the layers of
dirt. She had tried to wash regularly, but the journey of the last
few weeks through the Jornada del Muerto had given her no
opportunity to bathe. On the route of the Dead Man’s March, there
was scarcely water to drink, let alone bathe in. And even if she
could have found water, there were the men, always the men.

The dirt would wash off but her skin was so brown.
Maria patted her face. It used to feel soft, but now the skin was
stretched tight over high cheekbones. Her deep blue eyes held a
hungry look. There was nothing even remotely appealing about
her.

“Why, I look eighteen or nineteen,” she said out
loud, then burst into tears. In helpless misery, she threw the
mirror outside the grove, rested her head on her arms and cried
until she fell asleep.

Later, she could not have said what woke her, what
nerve was touched to compel her into instant wakefulness. Evening
had come and brought with it something strange and terrible. Then
she saw the flickering lights against the blackness. Every wagon
was blazing with fire. Maria dropped down behind the tree she had
slept against and peered out through the underbrush. A scream
started deep in her throat but never reached her lips.

Some of the freighters were already dead, the bodies
piled here and there, appearing, then vanishing in the flickering
light of the bulging wagons. Indians swarmed around the remaining
men of the wagon train, herding them close to the water’s edge.
Their weapons had been left at the wagons. They were helpless as
the Indians hacked and tore at them. They were silent, except for
Father Efrain who prayed, his voice as calm and matter-of-fact as
if he were offering morning prayers. Maria listened to him as his
voice droned on and on, only changing pitch as he was pushed from
Indian to Indian. He stopped suddenly before the end of his
supplication and Maria pushed her fist into her mouth to keep from
crying out.

When Father Efrain was silenced, Carmen de Sosa
began to scream, a thin, whining cry that made Maria hunker down
lower in the bushes, take her hand out of her mouth and cover her
ears. But still she could hear Señora de Sosa. Maria’s heart beat
like a drum. Carmen was calling for her. “Maria! Maria!” she
screamed over and over, seeking after six months of silence for a
deadly friendship.

Maria sucked in her breath. “Father in heaven,” she
whispered, “please do not let the Indians understand what she is
saying.” If the Indians had any idea that there was another woman
on that supply caravan, they would search for her until they found
her.

Maria gasped aloud at the sound of tearing cloth,
then was silent as Carmen’s screams filled the enormous night.
Finally, they fell away to a moaning sob that Maria could barely
hear above the laughter of the Indians. The end was near, but the
end was more terrible than what had gone before. Maria watched an
Indian peel Carmen de Sosa’s scalp away from her skull, taking the
ears, too, then holding it up to catch the firelight glinting on
the dripping earrings.

To keep from crying out, Maria stuffed the hem of
her dress in her mouth and burrowed into the ground. Wildly her
mind raced through an entire catalog of saints to pray to, but
another part of her brain told her that prayer was useless. As the
Indians hacked and scalped their way through the growing pile of
bodies, Maria knew that the heavens were closed, that God slept on
this February night.

She must have fainted then, because when she opened
her eyes, it was morning. She was lying on her back looking up at
the sky. The air was cool and clouds like lamb’s wool scudded
overhead. A bird sang in the tree nearby. She almost closed her
eyes again, then, in a flood of terror that left her weak, as she
remembered. She rose cautiously to her knees, then sat back
quickly. The Indians were still there.

Dressed in the clothes of the dead, they squatted
close together against the chill of the early dawn. One of the
savages wore Father Efrain’s robe, stiff with the blood of the
padre. Another Indian had draped Carmen de Sosa’s skirts around his
shoulders. As Maria watched, he clapped Carmen’s bloody blond scalp
on his head and pranced around while the other men laughed.

Dead men lay everywhere, some of them hacked to
pieces, their body parts flung along the riverbank. The heads
stared with sightless eyes and open mouths at the same blue sky
Maria had awakened to. Other freighters had been scalped but left
in one piece, their bodies scattered at random. They lay in
grotesque poses like overgrown dolls, tossed by a child in a
rage.

Maria tried to look away from the fly-covered,
bloated corpses, but she could not. With dreadful obsession, she
stared at the hunks of skin and bones that only hours before had
been fathers, husbands and brothers, looking forward to the
completion of a tedious journey.

When she finally forced herself to avert her gaze,
she looked around to get her bearings. She was lying under the
trees in a small gully, the merest incline. By sitting up slightly,
she could see the Indians through a skimpy cover of bush and tall
grass. Anyone approaching the grove from behind would spot her
immediately. She must move farther into the bushes.

Maria slowly pulled her legs up under her dress,
grateful for once that her poverty had allowed only dull brown
wool, instead of the brightness of Carmen de Sosa’s sea-green silks
that were now warming the Indian by the fire. The color of the wool
blended with the dry winter grass around her. She pulled herself
into a compact ball and started inching toward the bushes.

A flash of light caught her eye as she began to
move. It was the mirror. With a sudden stab at her insides, she
remembered how she had tossed the mirror outside the circle of
trees. As it glittered at her in the morning light, she knew that
sooner or later one of the Indians would notice the gleam and come
closer to investigate. She would be discovered.