Treasure of the Sun (24 page)

He'd never be so careless with her again. In fact, he chuckled, he'd probably never let her out of his sight again.

"What's so funny?" she asked, her voice slurred.

"I was just thinking," he lied, "that only a fool would think you could miss the clues. And I'm no fool."

The body against his softened, melted into his. He was forgiven.

30 May, in the year of our Lord, 1777

May God have mercy on his soul

Fray Patricio has died, unshriven and in agony. For the first time in days, we saw the sun. It broke through the clouds at sunset, and we crawled into our miserable beds in the underbrush. We slept, but Fray Patricio woke us. He'd heard slight noises which we identified as trackers. We rose and climbed a dark, narrow path that was lit only with our prayers and the feeble stars.

The ground beneath our feet gave way. Fray Lucio clung to a rock; I slipped and my cassock caught on a bush, suspending me in midair.

Fray Patricio felt a long distance. We could hear him scream as he landed. For the remainder of that black night, his moans rent the night air. Fray Lucio could do no more than pray. I feared to move, believing that any activity on my part would separate the roots of the bush from the already unstable dirt. My soul writhed in agony as I realized my healing powers couldn't help Fray

Patricio, as I realized the depth of my own cowardice. Morning dawned, and the sounds from beneath me ceased. I saw the body of my brother far below. He was beyond human help.

I carefully crept from my perch. Fray Lucio was devastated, trembling, weak. I forced him to participate in prayers for the dead, and I will continue to seek rest for Fray Patricio's soul

Miraculously, Fray Patricio had dropped the chest of gold within easy reach.

-from the diary of Fray Juan Estevan de Bautista

Chapter 11

Without moving her head, she ran her gaze over the room washed with the early morning light. It looked di1ferent. It smelled di1ferent. The bed seemed narrower, less stable, yet safer. The contours of the room seemed altered, skewed from their previous dimensions. The world-she shut her eyes--the world no longer spun in the tight circle she'd known before. It wobbled on its axis, and she could perceive its every twitch. She knew what had happened; her body told her, with its muscles aching in new places. But she understood with her mind.

Like the wind, Damian had overwhelmed her, moved her where he wished, taken her places she'd never been before and never wished to be. As he'd implied, he'd changed her perception of the world. She opened her eyes again and frowned.

Was that a good thing? She'd been quite pleased with her perception of the world before. Indeed, some less sure companions had called her smug, but she considered her complacence more of a clarity of goals and an understanding of propriety. And this was not propriety.

Even now, Damian's form warmed her back. It counteracted the cool of a morning on the coast, and brought her chilly feet seeking his legs. He grunted when ten icy toes made contact, but his light snoring never broke rhythm. That surprised her, for the man rose as early as a farmer, declaring that morning was the best time of the day. Perhaps he'd stayed awake the night before. Heaven knows he'd been inquisitive long after she'd been prepared to sleep.

Taking care not to disturb him, she eased out of bed. The privy lay close outside her door, and she reached among the jumble of her bags to find her robe. She lifted it, examined it. The brown homespun looked exactly as it had, and she experienced a ridiculous thrill. The intruder hadn't harmed her robe, but . . . her gaze fell on the carpetbag she had brought from Boston. The lining had been turned inside out, cut up, ripped wide. Dropping to her knees, she searched until she found her watch. It still ticked, its works open to her gaze.

With fingers that trembled, she searched for and found the discarded back. It snapped into place. The watch was whole again, miraculously untouched by the ordeal of the night. She touched it tenderly and returned to her labors. Picking up one garment after another, folding them, she noted that all the linings had been rent. Her shoes had been cut. Yet she felt nothing but gratitude that this destructiveness had barely touched her.

A slit throat, she thought humorously, does wonders to restore a sense of balance.

That balance was ruined when she found her new dress.

At the bottom of the pile, Damian's gift had been reduced to fragments with the knife. Tears in the bodice cut across the darts. The skirt had been slashed. If this was the intruder's way of terrifying her, he'd succeeded. She felt violated, dirty, personally threatened.

She dropped it and fled the room. She gulped in the cool air of the outdoors; it revived her. The dew on the grass wet her toes and recalled her to her errand. When she finished, she returned to her room without a glance at the clothes in the corner.

That left her only one place to go. At the rumpled bedside, she gazed at Damian. She'd never seen him asleep before. A thrill, almost maternal in nature, quivered up her spine. How beautiful he was. Again she was stricken by his resemblance to the Greek gods, immortalized in marble for all eternity. Except for the eyebrows, he looked like the mature Apollo, all noble angles and seductive sensuality.

She traced one eyebrow on its upward sweep. Her hand drifted down to the sharp line of his lips against his face. It marked the contrast between the tanned, stubbled skin of his cheek and his smooth, pliant mouth. Compulsively, her hand moved to his short mustache, to his lips. His head turned under her hand. A kiss pressed into her palm, another onto her wrist.

He looked up at her, and the thrill this time was not at all maternal. Something solid, some kind of communication passed between them. She understood him without words, and an uneasy intuition squeezed her insides. He lifted the covers and pulled her back onto the bed beside him. Sliding his head along the pillow, he brought his mouth close enough to tempt her, and she hastily asked, "What's the treasure of the padres?" That halted the kiss, the early morning lovemaking, the murmur of sweet words and the tender aftermath.

"What's the treasure of the padres?" he parroted.

It pleased her to note that she'd distracted him from that kiss, and all of its marvelous repercussions. It signalled her successful retreat into rationality.

"Why do you ask about the treasure of the padres?"

"That person wants it and thinks I have it."

"That person?" Looking as dumbfounded as it was possible for Apollo to look, he said, "You mean, the fiend who slit your neck spoke of the treasure of the padres? You didn't tell me last night?"

"I'm telling you now. Last night you had other things on your mind." What a wicked pleasure she experienced, seeing him rendered speechless.

"Why would you know anything about the treasure of the padres? You didn't grow up in California."

"He thought Tobias knew about the treasure."

"Madre de Dios. This killer couldn't be serious. The treasure is nothing but a legend," he protested.

The pleasure of seeing him rattled faded, and she sobered.

"That knife felt very serious against my neck."

"Let me see that wound," he ordered, sitting up. "I need to change the bandage."

Of course he didn't need to change the bandage, but she turned obediently under his hands and offered her throat. He needed to reassure himself about her health. He needed to see that the cut was healing, touch the bruised skin around it. "Tell me about this treasure," she coaxed.

"It's just silliness." He unwound the linen from her neck.

"Just an old tale. Nothing of importance." She waited. "You're not convinced."

She shook her head.

"When I was young, we boys would go out to help round up the cattle. At night, the vaqueros would tell tales around the campfire. Scared us boys spitless, of course, and that delighted the cowboys. These myths fascinated Tobias, and his fascination reawakened my curiosity. It had been a long time since I'd felt the surge of excitement a treasure hunt brings."

"I can't imagine."

"Can't you? As a child, didn't you ever pretend you were a conquistador, traveling through uncharted territory, braving dangers to follow the trail of treasure?" His eyes glowed when she shook her head. "No? It was one of my favorite games. The thrill comes at the thought of gold and jewels, unseen by human eyes for a hundred years, yet waiting for me."

"That's interesting." She drummed her fingers on the covers, feeling he was trying to distract her, feeling he might succeed. "I can't imagine Tobias pretending such a thing."

"Perhaps not, but the man loved to travel and the legend was an excuse." Fixed with blood, the linen bandage stuck tight against her neck. He slipped from the bed and tripped over his breeches, wadded into a ball on the floor. With a careless disregard for her hungry eyes, he pulled them on. "The missions were secularized in the thirties. The Indians were freed, poor souls, kicked off the lands without money or guidance by the rancheros who confiscated the mission lands. Still, a few Franciscans, a few Indians cling to the old ways, and some of the rancheros allow them to stay in the mission buildings--no great favor, for they are falling into ruin. A few missions were returned to the jurisdiction of the Franciscans three years ago, stripped of the lands, of course. Tobias and I visited the ranchos and missions to hear the old folks tell their tales."

"Tobias must have loved that."

They shared a smile of reminiscence. "He did. The padres loved it, too. He was so interested, so enthused! They showed him the mission libraries and helped him seek out all the material written about the early days."

"Did you visit all the missions?"

Damian set his chin in annoyance. "Senorita, you may believe I'm a trifler, but actually I'm a very busy man. I didn't have time to visit all the missions with him. Together we went as far south as Mission San Luis Obispo."

"But did you go to all the missions with him?" she insisted. "No," he admitted. He carried both the pitcher and bowl to the bedside, wet a rag and sat over her to drip water on her throat. "The southern missions neither of us had the time to visit. Mission San Juan Bautista was so close at hand I urged him to visit it by himself."

Startled to see his color rise, curious about the faint guilt on his face, she asked, "Why didn't you want to go there? As you say, it's so close at hand that it wouldn't have taken much of your time."

He squeezed water onto her face in a careless maneuver she suspected was a decoy for her attention. He apologized profusely and under her steady gaze conceded, "You see, I have been there so many times. Fray Pedro knows me from my childhood, and he always asks me for my confession .... You're just delighted to see me squirm, aren't you?"

She nodded.

He tweaked her ear. she gave him a little shove, and he almost fell off the bed. He righted himself and warned, "Careful, that floor is hard. You'd not enjoy it at all."

Pulling a skeptical face, she ignored his challenge and took the proffered towel to dab her face. "So Tobias could have found something out about a treasure?"

"Not just any treasure. The treasure of the padres."

"Haven't you tantalized me enough? Tell me what it is."

''It's just a legend. Just a story that's been told to frighten children since the days when Padre Junipero Serra walked the countryside to found the missions." He had forgotten her injury, had forgotten his self-appointed chore. "When the Spaniards came to California they expected to find gold and silver in abundance. It had been foretold by the Indians on the trip up from Mexico."

"It seems that every conquistador who roamed the New World believed every Indian who told him what he wanted to hear," she observed.

He grunted in disgust. "Too true. Of course, no one found gold in California. There's no gold in California, but there's a tale that some padres, with the permission of Fray Serra, made a move to convert the Indians of the Sacramento Valley. Pure nonsense, of course."

"Of course."

"Hell, the padres couldn't even keep up with all the converts on the coast. The interior was totally unexplored. They had no idea how far inland they would have to go, or how many mountain ranges they would have to cross. Why would they go looking for trouble?"

"I don't know. Why would they?"

He played with the end of the bandage. "The Indians on the coast, for the most part, were docile. The Indians on the interior were savages. The story says that these brave padres believed it was their duty to bring these savages the Word of Christ. One padre especially, Fray Juan Vincente-no, wait, that wasn't his name." He hung his head as he thought and produced his name in triumph. "Fray Juan Estevan traveled into the unknown to convert the Indians. In the spring of 1776, eight Franciscan brothers disappeared into the mountains with an escort of twenty soldiers."