Tales of the Knights Templar (26 page)

The old man glared down the slope at the little clutter of low houses, the slick ribbon of heated asphalt running east and west, the lazy brown river sleeping in the hot sun below a rock ledge. Roma, indeed! So this was how the magic dwindled. Fury and despair warred in him; he could almost feel their clawed feet on either rib, their teeth locked in his heart. No time, no time. Whatever this was, this place called Roma by a river—the wrong Roma, the wrong river—he would have to finish his work here. He had chanced it all, and lost. He would never see the seven hills again, the Tiber’s flow; he would never feel a Mediterranean breeze on his cheek.

Beneath him, the horse shifted impatiently. He flexed his back, releasing, and it paced forward. The hill behind him wasn’t much of a hill, and the town ahead looked to fit its hill. Only the hot wind, hot already this early, blowing out of the scrubby waste across the river, felt familiar. It had been many years—more than he could readily count—since he had felt that heat. Then, he had flinched from its blast, but now, he accepted gratefully the ease it promised his joints.

It was a good sign that the boy had crossed himself, had known his paternoster. If it should be a region of Catholics, he might yet find a successor. The power weighed on him. He had sought it, to be sure, in those days when he had been young and foolish. He had been glad to take up the burden, before he knew what it weighed.

Slowly, as slowly as if his horse were the rack-boned, spavined creature it appeared to the outer eyes, the old man rode down into the town. His gaze missed nothing. Not the pig in its narrow sty, not the little gardens protected by wattle or stone wall from drying winds. Not the bare-bottomed babies playing in the yards, the girls hanging out wash, the quick slap of palms indoors shaping tortillas, the boys quarreling, the smells of cooking, of chickens and pigs and goats and humans. He rode past the little store and post office on the highway, past a pink house with a washing machine on the front porch, past a gas station. He could feel the eyes on him, though no one spoke. He saw the cross on the church, nearer the river, and when he came closer he saw that it stood on a stony prominence.

Now what? He dismounted and opened the door. A faint ecclesiastical odor seeped out along with a cool breath. But no one was within, though a light glimmered at the altar. He cleared his throat; no one answered. The priest—surely there was a priest—must be away. For long? He had no idea.

The horse pulled away, straining toward a tuft of grass burnt brown as old hay. It was hungry, and no wonder. So was he. He would have to find out when the priest might return; he would have to find food and shelter. The words of the Rule came back to him, as so often, in mockery. “… Shall have meat but three times a week.” In the camps he had not seen meat for years on end. “Shall eat in common.” That he had done, when he had eaten at all. Poverty had been the easiest part of his vow to keep, all down the years. Chastity … well, easier now, in age. Obedience, that was the difficulty.

He touched his chest, where beneath his clothes the sliver of bone rested. He had vowed obedience to God, of course, but also another, more immediate obedience, to the Master. He had no Master now, but that bit of bone; and in the years he had carried it, it had ceased to speak in his inner ear. He had no one now to follow, and for a soldier this was a greater burden than his age. How could he follow orders if none were given?

Esperanza had wakened before dawn with the memory of many screams ringing in her ears. Again. Each time closer … and unlike her old teacher, she took no pleasure in that knowledge. She lay straight, arms at her sides, and let herself feel the pull of the earth, the sea, the sun still below the rim of the world, the four winds. Through her narrow window, a trickle of predawn coolness roughed her skin like a cat’s tongue. She heard the thin
skreek
of a gate hinge, and the clatter of little hooves. So. That little scamp Xavier, Pico’s son, was off with the goats before dawn again. He must have angered his brothers again; this was his favorite escape.

She rose from her narrow bed, touching without thinking the charms she wore, the charms of the bed itself.
For a safe night, I thank you,
she said without sound, and felt the darkness accept her thanks. She murmured a little in her throat, something no skulking thief could hear and use against her, then looked sideways out her window. There, to the east, the vague blurred streak of coming dawn. A truck went by on the road, its tires whining. The truck was no concern of hers, but the street was. She had her ways of knowing what she needed to know, night and day.

She stretched out on her bed again, riding the sense of power that knowledge gave her, until something jolted the inside of her head. Something more powerful … something dangerous … some great change … coming soon. Coming today.

She went into the kitchen. Something hissed at her from the floor, and her blood went cold. Then she felt the fur on her ankles, the twining of the kitten around her feet.
Fool,
she said to herself.
Fool. Go and look. Find out.

Thus Esperanza was the second person in Roma to see the old man. She had gone up to the store for nothing but the chance to look at the charms she had put beneath certain windows, above certain doors. Had they been moved? Had the persons involved done what they’d been told to do? She was eyeing the cards of lace and ribbons, well aware of the sidelong looks she herself got from the children who hung around the candy rack, when she heard the hoofbeats.

Not that hoofbeats themselves were that unusual. But this sounded like a monster of a horse, and with the hoofbeats came that tightening of her skin that told her great magic was near. She edged up the aisle with the bread, the baked goods (inferior store-bought cookies, cinnamon rolls, fried pies) and peeked out the front window. And blinked. The old man in ragged white garments that belonged on the poorest peon off some ranch in the Mexican hinterlands … the old man on the scrawny dark horse … that was the source of the power she felt. It threw back her probing touch as if a horse shook a fly off its hide. She had never felt anything like it.

She reached again, and again her curiosity, her intuition, slid off that old man as if he were not human. For she had power over men as well as women: She had never met a man she could not understand, not even that silly foreign priest. She prided herself on that; she knew things about the priest he did not know about himself, and she knew things about every man in the town: who would sire only daughters, who had no eggs at all, who wore the horns, and worse. There was always worse; that was the secret depth of her knowledge.

But this man—if man he was—bewildered her questing intelligence. And he carried—it was not himself, but in his possession—magic of such power that she could almost weep to think of it. Almost—but weeping, which was most women’s useful tool, could not be hers. She never wept true tears, to give power to those who would drink them. No, she would not weep. She would find out what it was, and gain that power for herself.

Father Patrick Dougherty would have worried, except that Xavier said the old man was a knight. Of course he wasn’t really a knight; that was only the boy’s imagination, or the old man’s fairy tales, but if Xavier’s interest was in stories of mounted heroes, he hadn’t been hurt. Yet.

“But he don’t speak no
Español,
not really, so I can’t understand all he say. His
Ingles
ain’t so good, either.”

The priest spoke Spanish, but the boys laughed at his accent and replied only in their fractured English, liberally laced with Border idiom.

“I should go see him, perhaps,” he said, half to himself. He knew he should go see the old man, but he also knew Alfonso Gutierrez was dying, and he was on his way out to the ranch.

“He’ll be all right,” Xavier said, scratching one foot as he stood on the other. “He’s a good man.”

The priest doubted that. Why would a good white man come to Roma, Texas, and live in a single back room by himself and give candy to boys like Xavier? He himself had come because he was sent; he would have chosen a greener land and people who spoke English with his own lilt, if he’d had the choice. Old men giving candy to boys was bad enough, but the strange stories— he didn’t fit, the old man. But Alfonso was dying, and it was time for his regular call.

Xavier grinned, the urchin grin that the priest found strikingly similar to the urchins of his homeland. Boys were boys anywhere, he thought. In spite of changes in the world, in spite of movies and that new distraction, television, boys still made mischief and still grinned dimpled, gap-toothed grins.

Men, however … men changed in ways the priest didn’t entirely understand. Oh, they had the same lusts as always—Xavier the boy would become Xavier the young man, risking his immortal soul, not to mention his life, with the plump whores behind the tavern. He would stand before the altar to marry some shy girl; he would father a stair-step gaggle of dark-eyed children and get fat and old. …

The priest yanked his mind back to the immediate problem, and thought about it all the way out to the ranch and all the way back. This stranger, now, this white man from far away, who spoke no Spanish and bad English, who gave candy to boys and told them romantic stories … he would not let such a man harm his boys, the boys whose souls he was here at the end of the world to save. When he got back, he would ask Xavier to show him where the old man lived.

“He live here,” Xavier said. “He pay Miz Rosales five dollar—” The priest glanced at the rickety lean-to room held onto the back of the Rosales house by nothing more than faith and a coat of pink paint. It had been built for the older Rosales boys, before they and their father died of fever. Now the Widow Rosales rented it out when she could. A shed roof; a door with its blue-painted frame open to the yard and close to the back gate into the alley. Not really an alley, more of a public footpath, wide enough for two or three to walk together, to drive a pig along, to lead a donkey. Not wide enough for a car.

“He has a car?” the priest asked. He had to have a car. How else could a white man, a stranger, have come here? But Father Patrick saw no car—indeed, had seen no car he did not know in the past year, except on the highway itself.

“No
carro,
” Xavier said. He was almost dancing with glee; he had interested the priest, and he would have something to brag about. “He come on horse.”

“On a horse!” The priest stared at him, suspecting a child’s romantic fabrication. No one traveled by horse anymore, not in the 1950s. Not here, where straying off the public roads could be quick cause for a quick shot and no inquest at all. Some few people had a horse, and the men who worked on those dangerous ranches—but …

“A
real
horse,” Xavier insisted. The priest thought about that. In Xavier’s world, a real horse might be not only an actual horse, but a horse unknown in this town—a cavalry mount, a horse from the movies, something new.

“What did it look like? The horse?”

The boy spread out his arms. “Oh,
muy grande
—much big, very tall. Shiny, like oil. Like a charro horse, in Mexico.”

A showy horse, then, big and shiny. Here? He saw no sign of a horse in that silent, bare yard. Only the Rosales dog, lean and yellow, tied with a thick rope to the pole of the clothesline. Only the retama tree casting its threadbare shade over a wooden table … a corona vine, almost indecently lush at this season, sprawled over the little wooden shack in the yard’s corner.

“Not here,” the boy said, unnecessarily. “The horse went away.”

Went away. Like something in the boy’s imagination, when he opened his eyes. The priest, confused and stifled in the heat, let his eyes drift around the yard. Bare dirt, a tire planted with verbena so bright a red it hurt the eye, blue—those blue-painted door and window frames. At once he felt a surge of anger. These people! They would not give up their ridiculous superstitions. …

“He let it go,” the boy went on, eagerly. “He sent it away—my cousin Miguelito saw it. Into the river.”

Blue around the doors and windows to keep the evil spirits out, and charms besides … not even Christian charms, a crucifix or Madonna or St. Christopher medal, but little knots of this or that, twigs and leaves, feathers and shells. The Widow Rosales, who came to Mass faithfully, and whose front door was innocently blank except for the blue paint, had nailed something like a birds’ nest above the rear.

Xavier followed his glance and scowled. “You don’ wanna bother with that,” he said. “That’s the—” and he glanced aside, made the sign and spit over his shoulder.

“I know who that is,” Father Patrick said. He knew, and he didn’t know. He had been warned about these people and their witches, their
curanderos
and
curanderas,
rarely openly called
brujos
or
brujas,
who pretended to be healers but were dabbling in far blacker arts than healing. Powerless, of course, except to the superstitious. He knew a
curandera
practiced in this town. But he didn’t know who she was. Xavier did—they all did—but they all pretended not to understand his question.

“Bruja? No!”
they said, making the sign of the cross, pulling their children close.
“No curandero aqui!”
they would say, men and women and children, when he asked.
“No curandera.”

But the blue windows and doors, the obvious charms the babies wore … One of these women, who came to Mass and knelt passively before him, who slurred the clean Latin of the liturgy into soft Spanish … one of these women was the devil’s personal agent.
Curandera.
Witch.

He dragged his gaze back to the lean-to. Xavier had already darted forward to knock on the doorpost. No one answered. The old man should be there; Xavier said he sat or lay in the room all day. That he did his meager shopping early or late. Perhaps he was ill? Father Patrick came forward and peeked through the half-open door.

The little room lay bare to his eyes. A metal-framed cot, with a thin mattress wrapped in sheets and a coarse gray blanket. Who needed a blanket in this heat? A crucifix on the wall—proper, but it surprised him. Probably Senora Rosales had put it there. A three-drawer chest, tilting to the side, with skewed drawers that wouldn’t quite shut. It had been painted dark red by an unskilled hand, and across the top lay an ornate doily crocheted in yellow cotton yarn. On the doily, a blue enameled washbasin and pitcher. A single box of unpainted wood with a plain metal clasp.