Bride of Thunder (19 page)

Mayel held a rinsed membranous bag, which Chepa stuffed expertly with the onion mixture, touching her own ample stomach and pointing to the membrane so that Mercy knew that one was the pig's. Chepa called to the boy by the pit, and he began lifting out smoldering wood, ashes, and stones with a small shovel. He put damp henequén fiber on the remaining stones, and on this Chepa arranged banana leaves, the stuffed stomach, and the little pig, then covered them with more leaves and damp fiber. Smoking branches, ashes, and stones went over this. A last layer of the soaked hemp was tamped down by earth.

“Ready tonight,” Chepa said. “
Muy buena
.”

Feeling somewhat queasy, Mercy praised the seasonings. She had never liked to prepare meat from a recognizable animal and hadn't eaten flesh at all when living alone. Philip had jeered at her for her squeamishness. She had scolded herself for failing either to avoid meat altogether or else to have the hardihood to face up to its origins.

Back in the kitchen, already tidied up by one of the pretty young women who was now making tortillas, patting the corn dough into round, thin cakes to be baked on the large, flat stone occupying the rear of the grate above the cooking fire made on a conveniently raised stone foundation, Chepa urged Mercy to have a cup of hot chocolate, When water, chocolate, and spices in a saucepan came to a boil, Chepa selected an elaborately carved
molinillo
from the rack and twirled it in the boiling liquid till it began to foam. She took it from the fire, let the foaming stop, then put it over the heat again and spun it till the foam threatened to overflow. One more time she did this before taking the beverage to the table, twirling till the chocolate pleased her critical eye.

Chepa poured the hot chocolate into two blue-and-white mugs and handed one to Mercy, taking the other herself as she sank into a cushioned leather chair with the manner of one who's earned a rest. That chair, in a corner where she could watch the whole kitchen, the cooking court, and the inside courtyard, was clearly her throne, from whence she regulated the preparation of meals and the running of the household. Everyone moved briskly when she spoke, but she exuded goodness and said nothing when the tortilla-maker divided the remaining hot chocolate with Mayel.

Mayel, not used to a kitchen in which such largesse was routine, shot a nervous glance at Chepa, who smiled and nodded. The girl's face gleamed. She drank in a neat, concentrated fashion that reminded Mercy of a blissful kitten's innate fastidiousness. Already she seemed less scrawny, and she didn't always flinch when someone came near her. When she grew out of her coltish boniness, she'd be unusually beautiful.

She hadn't wanted to marry the man selected for her by the mayordomo of the hacienda near Uxmal. Would she find someone here who wouldn't disgrace the blood of Jacinto Canek? Mercy shrugged the thought away. She was by no means sure that marriage was the happiest thing for women, though economics and custom forced them into it. Zane had given her guardianship of Mayel. She'd see that the girl wasn't compelled to take a husband.

It was ironic to have control over another person's fate while she had so little over her own. Of course, it had been better to come to La Quinta by choice. Zane had been mightily impressed that Eric Kensington had offered his bond-slave marriage. It must put him more on his honor to keep his promise not to take her forcibly.

The great trouble was that it wouldn't take that much force.

Wrenching her wayward thoughts from the hard curve of his mouth, which
could
soften when he looked at Jolie, from the long, steel-muscled hands that weakened her the most when they were gentle, and, most of all, trying not to remember that dark granite of his eyes that was sometimes almost black, other times smoky, Mercy smiled at Chepa.

“Delicious!” she complimented, savoring a last taste of hot chocolate.

“
Deliciosa!
” Chepa laughed. “Close to same. Many such words.”

Mercy thanked Chepa, then said, with reservations, that she looked forward to the
cochinita pibil
that night. She was just leaving when a young woman appeared in the doorway, holding a choking, gasping child in her arms.

Chepa at once opened a cabinet and got a hunk of what looked like resin from a jar. Putting this in a chipped pottery bowl, she lit it and held it for the youngster, a handsome but pitifully thin four- or five-year-old, to breathe.

A number of times after she tried to take over her father's duties, Mercy had asthma patients inhale steam. Sometimes it helped, but often she was helpless to do more than brew soothing teas, try to rub some of the spasmed tightness from the sufferers' backs, and pray they would catch their breath. It was an illness that terrified her.

Therefore, she watched in fascination as the boy gradually stopped choking. In a few minutes he coughed up phlegm, which Chepa caught in a bit of hemp fiber. Zane had explained that fiber too sunburned to be of commercial use was saved for pit-baking, cleaning machinery, scouring, and other odd jobs. A basket of the hemp was under the high table, and now Chepa used up several balls as the boy alternately drew in the aromatic smoke and brought up mucus.

Perhaps twenty minutes later, the child was breathing without the frightening wheeze that had wracked him at first.

Chepa patted his thin cheek, took an elixir from the cabinet, and gave it to the mother, along with some instructions. Murmuring thankful-sounding words, the woman left with the child.

Sadly, Chepa shook her head.

“But you helped him so much!” Mercy said.

“Till next time.” Chepa sighed and then brightened. “Salvador was bad sick, same thing, when El Señor bring him. Last few years not much.” She showed Mercy the remnants of the fragrant resin. “Copal help.”

“Copal?” Mercy echoed.

Wasn't that the incense burned at Salvador's near-martyrdom? “What was the medicine you sent home with them?”

“Sarsaparilla with
chia
and
tlatlacizpatli
. Also, if copal no work,
toloache
smoke good, but it make one see monsters, colors, things not really there. Better copal—if it work.”

“Don't sick people go to the
H-men?
”

Chepa gave her majestic shoulders a tiny shrug. “He make cure for witch sickness, find lost things, and knows about corn. But snakebite, machete cut, fever, bad cough, baby borning—people ask me.” She looked sad. “Old secrets. Father taught me. I was teaching daughter. Maybe now teach Mayel.”

Diffidently, because she didn't want to ask for knowledge forbidden to outsiders, Mercy said, “My father was a doctor, a healer of the sick. He taught me some things. Could you tell me the ways of your medicine?”

Chepa turned so that Mercy couldn't see her face. When Mercy had almost decided the woman hadn't understood, she turned and gazed for a long time into Mercy's eyes.

“I teach,” Chepa said.

For the next hour she showed Mercy and Mayel leaves, seeds, roots, and dried flowers, conveying their uses with signs when her English failed, correcting Mercy's pronunciation of each name till it was recognizable.

“I show plants growing,” Chepa promised. “Then you tell apart better.”

“I'll have to write it all down,” Mercy said. “What a lot there is to learn!”

“Much more,” Chepa said, an expansive motion of her arms embracing all directions. “The good God made a cure for all hurts.”

Possibly, if one knew what. Mercy was dazzled at the contents of the little cupboard, especially by the painkillers and anesthetics.

Besides
toloache,
there were various morning-glory seeds, cacti, leaves of the white
sapote,
and the roots and seeds of several impossibly unpronounceable plants.
Epazote,
or wormweed, would purge worms, as well as season food; mint-like salvia, borage, and steeped willow leaves were used for fever. The flowers and bark of the Mexican magnolia,
yoloxochitl,
helped heart ailments, and for the
garrapatas,
or chiggers, that had so plagued the journey, a dressing of agave gave relief.

There were treatments for gout, colds, pneumonia, diarrhea, constipation, and to increase the flow of mother's milk. “I can even,” announced Chepa, “pull tooth, no hurt.”

Mercy stared at this. Having a tooth pulled out was such a wretched and bloody experience that no one did it until infection or pain drove them to it. “You mean you give
toloache
or copal so the person doesn't feel the pain?”

Chepa shook her head. “No hurt. I show someday.” She giggled, a strange, girlish sound from her regality. “
H-men
wants to know. Never tell him. He has his things, and I have mine.”

So there was a little professional jealousy there. How Elkanah would have reveled by talking to Chepal Mercy thought a bit ruefully of the medicaments she'd brought with her, naturally assuming she might have to nurse the ignorant peasants. Even so, there might be a few things Chepa would like to add to her pharmacopoeia.

Mercy complimented Chepa's skill and supplies, thanked her for the instruction, and crossed the court to her room, eager to review her father's notes and go through her medicinal packets.

She thought she heard a door close as she entered. No one was there, but the cushions on the window ledge looked as if they'd been nestled against. Mercy paused, then got out the small carved animals she'd bought at Tekax. The deer and pheasant she placed close together on the window ledge, then positioned the jaguar in the corner far enough away not to be a suggested threat.

Surely Jolie would like them, and if they weren't a direct present …

Mercy had still not fully unpacked. She put her few remaining pieces of jewelry in a lacquer box on the chest, except for the black coral necklace Zane had given her. This she fastened around her neck. The sewing materials went on a shelf in the top of the armoire, where her dresses hung with a drooping shabbiness accentuated by the somber beauty of the quetzal dress.

Doña Elena's dance seemed an eternity ago, yet was less than a week had passed. Had Eric been drunk, to offer her marriages, especially knowing that she'd been wagered by her own husband on the turn of a card? The Viking had seemed sober enough. Perhaps he'd just wanted to annoy Zane.

A sort of chill fire shot through her as she remembered Eric's searing mouth and his cruelly inescapable embrace. In her heart she knew that his wish to have her was more than an accident, more than a perverse whim to anger Zane. But surely he was in Belize by now, or soon would be, and there was no reason why she'd ever see him again unless they met by chance in Mérida next year.

Mérida. Next year. Both seemed worlds away.

This is the fifth direction,
she told herself.
This is where you start
.

And already she
was
starting. She had at least a sketchy idea of henequén production, the workings of a village,
cochinita pibil,
and a treatment for asthma, as well as a glimpse of Chepa's other remedies. The schoolroom was arranged and some books were selected. Now all she had to do was capture her recalcitrant pupil, who'd rather help her friend cut henequén than behave like the master's daughter.

At least Jolie was capable of loyalty and affection. How delighted she'd been when Zane hinted that Victoriano, the
H-men,
might take an apprentice!

Mercy caught her breath in sudden inspiration. If Salvador thought the white man's learning might be useful, and if Zane would let him study with Jolie, that might be a way of making the studies palatable. Mercy had no wish to sit opposite a glowering, spoiled girl and try to penetrate a locked mind. Even less did she want to have to appeal to Zane to compel a semblance of compliance.

Cheered by hope that Salvador would welcome all the knowledge he could get, Mercy reached the bottom of her pack and took out her father's letters, books, and a small bundle. The bundle contained her medical remedies: sassafras' pungent bark; mint, which she knew could be found here; mountain pinks and the bark of dogwood root, for fever; horehound and mullein leaves for croup; garlic for influenza and bronchitis; dried pomegranate rind for diarrhea and dysentery; dandelion roots and yarrow for upset stomachs.

They were like old friends, remembrances of home, of her father explaining their use, and her efforts to ease his patients with them after he was gone. She held up another packet.

Rue.

The next, was rosemary. “…
that's for remembrance
.”

And in the last packet were dried violets, sweet-smelling, having many uses. But her mind flew back to Ophelia's grief for her father. “
I would give, you some violets, but they withered all when my father died
.”

Mercy put down her head and wept, but it was more purge than grief. These violets might be withered, but beautiful flowers grew here. Though her abilities were slight compared with Chepa's, and possibly even with Victoriano's, she would use them and improve, for her father's sake, if not her own. She would use her life in a way that would make less bitter the waste of the years he could not have, and in spite of his agnosticism and her own doubts, she prayed that he might somehow know. And she wouldn't be Zane's mistress unless he loved her and let her do her part at La Quinta. She wouldn't live shut up in a tower, sealed away from life, for any man, and one who would ask that couldn't truly care about her, anyhow.

She remembered her father's favorite words, from Marcus Aurelius: “
And art thou unwilling to do the work of a human being, and why, then, do you not make haste to do that which is according to thy nature?
”

Feeling a closeness, a sense of communication, as if Elkanah were watching her and smiling, Mercy opened his letters and began to read them.

9

Her father's letters alternated in their tone: outrage of a man whose colleagues seemed criminally careless and obstinate to excitement over a newly discovered substitute for a medicine kept from the South by the blockade; helplessness in the face of death, maming, and agony.