Byzantium (15 page)

Later, at the campsite, Josh cooked a can of Dinty Moore over the propane stove. When the stew was warm, he poured it into their plastic bowls, passing one to Shelly. She took her spoon, lifted a chunk of meat to her lips, cooled it with her breath, then ate.

“I’m leaving when we get back,” she said after she swallowed.

“What?” Josh said. They had neighbors—a couple with a backpacking tent on one side, three middle-aged men in a camper on the other—and she could tell what Josh was thinking. His face was darkening.
Not here,
he wanted to say.
Not now.
He wanted her to grin and say it was a joke. But she said nothing and finished the Dinty Moore. He would carry his stunned, sick heart through the next hours in silence, she knew, and then, once they were alone again, in their tent, and the night was finally quiet, their loud, beer-drinking neighbors safely retreated to their RV, he would try to wake her, whisper her back, believing it that simple, and she’d keep her eyes shut and pretend to be asleep.

M
OTA STUDIED THE MAP as the viceroy’s plump, pink finger traced the line of peaks into the far reaches of the northwestern frontier. “Here,” the viceroy said, stopping his finger in a wide stretch of empty parchment. “This is where he says it is.”

The viceroy was sitting in his sedan chair, held above the greenest lawn in all of New Spain by a pair of smooth-skinned guinea bucks. Women in meringue-pale dresses strolled past, followed by dandies with needle-thin swords at their waists. Parrots and quetzals squawked in brass cages hung among the trees, stretched their feathers against the wire bars.

“And you believe him, Excellency?” Mota asked.

“He gave me proof,” the viceroy said. “Listen. Ninety pesos to the quintal, sixty thousand marks of silver a year. The mine is too rich to ignore.” He leaned farther out, causing the front bearer’s knees to buckle, and tapped Mota on the chest. “I want you to claim it.”

MOTA HAD BEEN AN INSPECTOR OF MINES for the Royal Audiencia for ten years. It was not the career he had intended for himself. At Salamanca his sole friend, the third son of the Duke of Córdoba, had fed him stories of the New World: ribbons of ore, impatient creole virgins, the moon hanging low above a hacienda. So he had come, securing a minor post copying letters in the Audiencia and envisioning a future that already seemed set. He would become rich without thinking and live out his days growing fat in a creole palace, tickling his mistress each night while his wife whelped a child a year. Debarking at Veracruz, he had bribed the customs men and the men from the Holy Office—whose long fingers spidered every passenger’s books—so that he might hurry toward this new life in the city of Mexico.

He’d started off well. Within six months he’d made a good match, María Isabel, the seventeen-year-old daughter of a wine merchant. He’d seen her at a ball, standing behind a knot of protective old women, and her dark eyes, her willowy figure, her quiet manner had seemed to hold the secret to his happiness. He wrote letters and had them spirited to her room, spent nights hunched beneath her window. One evening a servant bumped into him in the street and pressed a handkerchief in his hand. It was María Isabel’s, and it contained a note in which she confessed that his constant, sorrowful figure had unlatched her soul.

More letters were exchanged. Mota saw María Isabel at other balls, trailed her during her afternoon walks. He pleaded with her father, and after a month of pressing his case he secured the man’s approval. Then, a week before they were to marry, Mota bribed the cook to sicken María Isabel’s duenna, so that he might climb through his waiting love’s window and claim her virginity. He and María Isabel lay together in her great bed with its silk-trimmed sheets until the hour before dawn, giggling as they listened to old Rosita curse and retch. A day later, though, María Isabel broke into sweats, and by the morning set for their wedding she was wrapped in lace and laid in her grave. The surgeon said the disease had risen from the lake in a fume, but Mota blamed himself. He was twenty-two. Locked in his tiny, rented room for five days, he wept until he felt his heart turn brittle. Then he went to the president of the Audiencia and begged for a job that would send him from the city, and the president gave him a mine to audit at Cuencamé.

THE VICEROY HAD TOLD MOTA he would find his guide waiting at the
pulquería
Hijas de Hernández, and it was there Mota went after he left the Alameda. The
pulquería
stood alongside a canal in the southeastern quarter of the city, behind the Convent of La Merced. Indian bargemen and idle creoles sat in its court, shaded by lemon trees as they watched leaves float toward the weir. Their watching was intense, punctuated by shouts—wagers had been placed on each leaf’s progress.

Inside the
pulquería,
most of the tables were empty, and those that weren’t were occupied by slouched loners or whisperers craned over their drinks. One of Hernández’s gawky daughters leaned against the bar, her face lit by a feeble shaft of sun. Alongside the far wall sat a man with the distinct look of a freshly bathed vagrant, his clothes new, his hair washed and combed, yet a nimbus of filth staining his person. His hand rested on a half-empty carafe.

Mota crossed the room toward him. “You are Father Pascual?” he asked. The previous morning, so Mota had learned, a man in tattered black robes calling himself by this name had taken the viceroy’s arm as he was leaving the cathedral. He had claimed to be a fugitive from Tayopa, said he had lived in hiding for two years, and offered, for a sizable sum, to guide a party back through the wilderness.

“I am,” the vagrant said, and gestured to the table’s empty chair. The man looked no older than Mota, but he was balding, his skin calloused and burnt, and he had mummied, claw-like hands. Mota sat and, keeping his voice low, said, “I will get straight to it. You say you come from Tayopa.”

Father Pascual bowed in acknowledgment.

“Do you have a map?”

“Here,” Father Pascual said as he tapped the left side of his forehead.

“Tell me, then, are the stories true? You Jesuits, your Yaqui slaves, bells struck in silver and gold?”

“Much of it is true,” Father Pascual said.

Mota took the carafe of pulque, tipped some into one of the spare glasses sitting on the table, and sipped. His throat burned.

“Why did you leave?”

“I had my reasons.”

“All right, so tell me how.”

“By night, by accident, and by terror.”

Worry swelled like a cloud beneath Mota’s stomach. The man shifted, turned, refused him even the slightest hint of solid truth. “You must give me a reason to trust you,” Mota said.

Father Pascual looked at him for a moment, then took a silk bundle from his pocket, laid it on the table, and unwrapped a dull, dung-colored rock streaked with the purest vein of silver Mota had ever seen.

“You could have gotten that from anywhere,” Mota said.

“Please. You know there’s no silver like this left in the New World. Except, of course, where I took it from.”

Mota felt his mouth turn dry. “Dawn,” he said as Father Pascual put away the rock. “The western causeway. I’ll have a mule ready for you.”

MOTA HAD ARRIVED AT CUENCAMÉ just four weeks after María Isabel’s death, still steeped in his sorrow, the memories of María Isabel continuing each day to leach into his blood. A branch of the mine had collapsed, and the low, steady toll of the church’s bell summoned coffin sellers to the mine’s iron gate, where already a horde of desperate men clamored for the dead men’s places. They shoved against widows, and two of the strivers toppled an unclaimed corpse. Mota watched with a mixture of fascination and disgust. Here beat the true pulse of the New World. Here its promises of happiness were given the lie, here the earth opened, loosing the upper chambers of Hell, and stripped men of all falsity.

When, a month later, Mota returned from Cuencamé with his audits, he asked the president of the Audiencia for another mine.

AFTER HIS MEETING WITH FATHER PASCUAL, Mota spent the evening rousing men for the expedition. Among the few in the city he trusted, he found three willing to go. The first was Baltazar, a half-Chichimec with a bull neck who’d once guided
conductas
through the Yucatán and had a skillful way with mules and the various necessities of camp life. The second was El Sepo, a hulking, muscled mulatto who wore gold rings etched with skulls on his fingers, wrote poetry in a little pigskin book, and was an expert tracker and fighter. The last was Fernando, a young, bespectacled creole scholar who always brought with him a satchel of brass instruments fashioned in Leyden and a large sketchbook complete with inks and watercolors for the making of maps and prospects. Mota hadn’t seen any of the three for months, and when he told them where they were going each one laughed and shook his head until Mota showed him the viceroy’s order with its promise of pay. Now all three waited with him at the end of the western causeway. Baltazar fiddled with the packs and hummed a tune from the city’s most recent
mascarada,
Fernando tested one of his Dutch glasses, and El Sepo frowned and crossed out lines in his pigskin book. Already the sun had risen an inch over the low eastern mountains, and Father Pascual was nowhere to be seen. Mota sat on his horse, attempted to stifle his nerves as he watched the city. Mexico seemed a storyteller’s vision floating in the middle of its lake, lashed to the land by narrow bridges and causeways, its bell towers and palms and poplars caught in the blue smoke of morning. But then Mota caught sight of a street cleaner pulling his cart of furred corpses; he turned away, remembering the feel of María Isabel’s cold, dead hand.

When Father Pascual at last arrived, jogging across the causeway, he shouted his apologies. The man was wearing the same clothes as the day before and carried nothing but a sackcloth bag, stained and worn to a shine at its folds. At Mota’s command Baltazar gave the ex-Jesuit a mule and the party set out.

THE FIRST STAGE OF THEIR JOURNEY, from Mexico to Zacatecas, was the easiest. The road was a smooth, tended highway that ran northwest through long-settled country, passing tidy villages, each with its bell tower and public garden, and taverns with bright wooden signs. Farmers in carts trundled by, forced aside at times by guard wagons hauling ore. Outside one village an old man sold boiled eggs and cupfuls of milk, and outside another a pig drover and his animals, caught in their cloud of dust, appeared like a spirit army on the horizon.

Mota had taken the Zacatecas route dozens of times. Lulled by its familiarity and by the easy tread of his horse, he let his mind open, caught and followed every memory, every thought: the morning his mother helped him dress for an interview with the priest to see if he had a vocation, the eight long days spent tracking a smuggler in the mist-swaddled mountains south of Oaxaca. He’d become so lost in memory’s thicket that when, four days out of the city, Father Pascual began talking, Mota at first didn’t notice.

“It is not one mine but several,” Father Pascual was saying to the others, “that run along a single rich vein in a box canyon deep in the mountains.”

Mota had pressed Father Pascual for details of Tayopa ever since they set out, but the man had refused to speak. All he knew were the rumors—that it lay beyond the farthest edge of Nueva Vizcaya, that the Jesuits who’d found it had worked it in secret so as not to pay the royal fifth, that the Indian uprising that had engulfed the northern provinces two years before had supposedly begun when the Jesuits’ Yaqui slaves revolted. For years stories had circulated throughout New Spain, filigreed by each teller’s imagination. That the Jesuits were building a grand desert city reached by flying boats was one of Mota’s favorites, delivered from the tooth-scarce mouth of a coffee seller in Mérida as he trudged through the street beneath his urn.

“The country is empty and twisting,” Father Pascual continued. “You could search for a dozen years and not find the mine. As much for secrecy as for fear of getting lost, no one was allowed to leave the canyon once he entered, except two of our brethren, who took the silver—only a fraction of it, mind you—to a mission near the coast, where it was packed in shipments of pilgrims’ sandals bound for Rome.

“My third year at Tayopa I became attached to a youth of sixteen. I taught him our language, and when we were discovered we were punished. One night he and I escaped together. I planned to draw a map as we fled and sell it to the governor of Culiacán, to fund our new life. But my youth was killed by one of the Tepehuán guards who patrolled the outer paths. I had not been seen, and I ran in terror, blindly, through country I had crossed only once before. One month later the Yaquis rose and slaughtered the other Jesuits and the Tepehuáns. I hid in a mangrove swamp along the coast, getting provisions and news from a fishing camp of friendly Mayos, then made my way down to the city. Two years have passed since that Tepehuán guard took my happiness, two years during which I mourned and hid in fear of the Society, and I care for nothing now except that I get my pay and can flee this country.”

For a few moments the five rode in silence. Then El Sepo spat. “He is a bugger. He admits it.”

Mota looked at Father Pascual. He remembered the slender, dark-haired courtier’s son who moved from bed to bed during his Salamanca days, thought of the rustlings he sometimes overheard in the camps. Such pleasures occurred, but one never spoke of them. “Are you?” Mota asked.

“I am,” the ex-priest said. “And I suppose you could kill me.” Here he paused, as if granting them the opportunity. “But then you wouldn’t find the mine.”

FIVE DAYS LATER they reached the shallow valley that was Zacatecas. The town lay sprawled below, spread before them like a felled giant, dormant in the late-afternoon sun. The mines, the camps, the stamping mills—all were silent, abandoned. In the refining yards, where normally teams of men stood in the quicksilvered sludge, chanting as they turned it with shovels, weeds now grew and piles of rusting tools awaited buyers. Mota had not visited Zacatecas in some time, but he had heard of its troubles. Two years ago the Crown had called in the miners’ quicksilver debts, and immediately a third had gone bankrupt. Then four of the mines flooded, and not a month later came the worst calamity: the Santa María, the last of the rich mines, lost its vein.

Once they passed the emptied mining works they gained the town proper. Half the houses were shuttered, and those that weren’t were flung open, flashing their gutted insides like a poor man presenting his turned-out pockets to a thief. Even the beggars had gone. And yet people still lived here: the thin smell of wood fire slipped through the air, and before the tread of their horses two dogs paused in the street, whined, and trotted on.

After a few hundred yards the Plaza de San Agustín opened before them, squared by four oak trees whose overburdened limbs knelt to the ground. Mota halted, the others pulling up behind him. The lodgings he had counted on were boarded up. As he contemplated the wide, blank wall of the convent that formed the plaza’s west side—it, at least, was in good repair—he drank from his waterskin. Then, without an exchange of words, Mota guided the others up the next street, toward the Plaza Pública, where he remembered a tavern. They were halfway there when a man in a dusty velvet coat and dirt-stained shirt shot out in front of them from the large stone house on their right. The man waved his hands for them to stop. It took Mota several moments before he recognized him as Don Ignacio Peñafiel, the town’s
alcalde.
Two years before he’d been fat, his lace cuffs like the traceries of powdered sugar decorating a pastry. Those lace cuffs, blackened with grime, now sagged from bony wrists.