Ben Stroud - Byzantium - Stories

AFTER MARÍA ISABEL, Mota had made formal court to no other woman. At times on his journeys daughters were presented to him like goods at auction; he would politely confess their charms and keep a committed bachelor’s distance. Beyond the occasional camp woman and the more common stretches of solitude, he’d confined his desires to the widowed sister of the baker from whom he rented his room in Mexico, and the skinny, untended wife of a Pueblo horse dealer, who preferred to meet him in the stable and wear a blindfold while he took her from behind. Like the beasts, she insisted — she would have it no other way. But in the last year the baker’s widowed sister had cut off their liaison, as she was being courted in earnest by a pastry maker, and the horse dealer’s wife had suddenly turned pious, pretending not to know him the last two times he had visited. Without their comforts, he’d felt the rot spread through him unchecked. New Spain, that great mill to which the unhappy and disappointed of the world came to be stamped anew, had left him ever as he was.

Then the viceroy had spoken the name Tayopa, and Mota’s heart had beaten briefly within his chest. He cursed himself as a fool, but such discoveries had transformed other men. He often saw them racing their pasteled carriages through the streets of Mexico, laughter and feminine squeals escaping from their windows.

WITHIN TWO DAYS they were beyond Yaqui lands. Now the river bent, flowing from the north, and they kept alongside it, riding into craggy foothills grown with sparse stands of oak and pine. Mountain Indians — Opata — were said to live here, but there was no trace of them, and blended in with the regular tick of nature’s chatter there seemed a particular silence.

After another day’s ride they passed through a scattering of abandoned stone huts, and four days later they came to a bottleneck too narrow to lead their mounts through. Without speaking they backtracked, and when Mota spotted an animal path they walked the horses and mules up it until they reached a small plateau, which gave onto a new canyon. They halted there while Fernando penciled their trail and El Sepo looked through the spyglass. Mota took a piece of biscuit from his pack. He was picking out weevils with the point of his knife when he heard El Sepo whisper, “Cattle.”

Putting the biscuit in his pocket, Mota took the spyglass from El Sepo and looked where he pointed. In the canyon below, four mottled cows stood in a clump of dried grass. Their ribs showed through their hides; they looked lost, half-wild, and Mota wondered how they had gotten here. Then he moved the spyglass, and the air caught in his lungs. On a rock, watching over the cattle, sat a woman. Long hair hung loose over her back. Mota goaded his horse over to Father Pascual.

“I thought this country was empty,” he said, keeping his voice low.

THEY RODE DOWN. Their path took them through several knots of pine, blocking their view of the woman’s rock, and when they reached the bottom of the canyon she was gone.

Mota sent El Sepo to track the woman while he and the others waited by the stream. Perhaps they should ignore her and travel on, but he’d seen through the glass that she wasn’t an Indian and he was curious. Besides, she might know something of the mine.

When El Sepo returned, he reported that the woman was hiding in a cave. He told too of a hut farther up the canyon — likely the woman’s — and Mota sent the others there to wait. Meanwhile he followed El Sepo up a path and then a ledge into a blind hollow high above the canyon. Here the cave opened atop a slope of red dirt. Mota motioned for El Sepo to stay where he was while he climbed. A few feet from the cave’s mouth, he stopped. The sun was directly above, and no light fell into the cave’s interior. “Don’t be frightened,” Mota shouted. “We only want to talk to you. We’ve come from Mexico. We can take you there, or to any town on our path.”

There was no answer. Mota looked down at El Sepo. El Sepo shrugged.

“I’m coming inside,” Mota said to the cave, and stepped in.

Beyond the first, penumbral feet, the cave’s void was entire. Mota fumbled over a blind jag of rocks, then stopped and listened. Silence. She was there, somewhere before him, behind the darkness. He strained his eyes, willed them to adjust. They refused, flooded black, liquid and numb. Mota moved forward, then stopped again when he heard the scrape of bare feet.

In an instant she was on him, a tangle of limbs pulling him down, and just as quickly he felt a sudden, sharp pain in his side. He caught her by the waist, held her squirming body to him. She struggled, but he kept her close and pulled her toward the sun. Once they were out of the cave she clawed at him, grunted and screamed, and El Sepo rushed up and took her by the arms. She kicked and stomped, but the mulatto carried her down the slope with ease. Free of the woman, Mota inspected his side. She’d stuck him with a cactus needle. He removed it — it slid easily from his flesh, drawing a bubble of blood — and dropped it among the brambles.

A DIFFERENT PATH LED OUT OF THE HOLLOW, and as they took it the woman traded her kicking for hanging lifeless against El Sepo’s grip, dragging her feet into a stumble. Still, she barely slowed them, and when they arrived at the hut Mota whistled at Father Pascual and gestured for him and Fernando to join them inside. El Sepo had already taken the woman there, and Mota could hear her shouting. As they entered she turned and made her address general. “Go ahead. Rape me. See how you like it. I’m stuffed with glass and quills.”

The woman sat on a rickety stool and El Sepo stood over her, his arms crossed. Her brown skin was reddened from the sun, and her body was animal-lean save for the loose breasts that swung beneath her shift as she twisted toward each of them. She might be a quarter blood, but Mota wasn’t sure.

“Please,” the woman said. “It would be such pleasure.”

“Enough!” Mota said. “None of us will harm you.”

This quieted the woman, though she continued to tremble.

“Just a few questions and we will leave you, if that’s what you wish,” he said. “We’re looking for a mine. Do you know anything about a mine?”

“When the Yaquis came, hammers and picks in their hands, I learned.”

“Have you been to it?”

“No.”

“Do you know where it is?”

“No.”

Mota glanced about the ramshackle cabin. It was little over three varas on either side. Dried plants and a pair of rust-bitten pots hung from the ceiling. On the far side of the room slumped a narrow bed. Maize leaves and feathers wriggled from its split mattress.

“How long have you been here on your own?”

“I’m not on my own.”

Mota laughed at the thinness of her lie. “How long?”

She looked away. “Two years,” she said.

BEFORE MOTA FINISHED QUESTIONING THE WOMAN, he learned her name was Beatriz and that she had been married at fifteen to a rancher named Tómas, who had brought her here and been killed by the Yaquis — an event over which she showed little regret. She had nothing else to tell them and after they bartered with her for a string of dried sausages they rode away from her hut. Mota had offered again to take her with them, but she’d only stared at him.

That night they made camp near the top of a ridge. As Mota was talking to Fernando and examining the maps, he spotted Father Pascual with the sackcloth bag he’d had the morning they left Mexico. Throughout their journey it had remained hidden. Mota watched as Father Pascual unknotted the bag then stuck his hand inside and pulled out a bull’s horn. Fernando made to get up, but Mota reached out to stop him. Holding the horn, Father Pascual scrambled to the top of the ridge, and, once he’d steadied himself, blew. The blast shot across the dusk, echoed against the slope that faced their camp, then fell away.