Carlos Fuentes - Terra Nostra

“It is he,” says the man, sure he recognizes certain identifying marks on the body of the shipwrecked youth lying below on the beach.

He and his men spur their horses forward and plunge down the dunes, raising blinding clouds of black dust. Their horses whinny as they near the prostrate body; the horsemen dismount, walk forward, and encircle the body, their footsteps resounding like whiplashes as they stride through pools of tepid water. The horses snort nervously at the unfamiliar scent, and seem to sense intuitively the fear behind the armor of that deep, strange sleep. The slow, silent sea, warm and muddied from the storm, laps at the shore.

The leader kneels beside the body, runs his fingers over the blood-red cross; then, grasping the boy beneath the arms, rolls him over. The youth’s lips part; half his face is blackened by sand. The man with the long, plaited moustache gestures, and his men lift the youth to his feet; the bottle drops from his grasp, and returns to the waves. The youth is dragged to one of the horses and thrown across its back like a prize of the hunt. His arms are lashed to the saddle trappings and his lolling head presses against the animal’s sweating flank. The chief issues a command and the company rides up the dunes and gains the flat rocky plateau extending toward the distant mountains.

Then through the dense fog they hear a sound like the rowels of spurs or metal striking against rock: following the sound appears a litter of burnished ebony; four Negroes strain beneath its weight as they advance toward the party of men leading a horse with a body across it.

A bell tinkles inside the litter and the blacks stop. Again the bell tinkles. The porters, with a concerted groan, hoist the palanquin with powerful arms and deposit it gently upon the desert sand. Exhausted by their efforts and the humid heat following the storm, the four naked men fall to the ground and rub their streaming torsos and thighs.

“Up, pigs!” shouts the man with the plaited moustache; as the horseman raises his whip to lash the porters, he communicates his fury to his mount; the horse rears and pitches in a nervous circle around the litter. The four Negroes, whimpering, get to their feet; their yellow eyes are filled with glassy anger, until a woman’s voice speaks out from behind the closed draperies of the litter: “Leave them alone, Guzmán. It has been a difficult journey.”

The horseman, still circling, still flogging the blacks, shouts above his horse’s snorting: “It is not well for La Señora to go out accompanied only by these brutes. The times are too dangerous.”

A gauntleted hand appears between the curtains. “If the times were better, I would not need the protection of my men. I will never trust yours, Guzmán.”

And she draws the curtains.

The shipwrecked youth believed he had been embalmed by the sea; blood pounded at his temples; he squinted through half-opened eyes; the sight of this fog-shrouded desert was perhaps not too different from what he would have encountered on the floor of an ocean of fire, for as he fell from the ship’s forecastle to the sea, he couldn’t see the waves he was falling toward, only the blazing corposant above him: the St. Elmo’s fire at the top of the mainmast; and when he was tossed unconscious onto the beach, he was wrapped in dense fog. But now, as he opened his eyes, the curtains of the litter also opened; instead of sea or desert or fire or fog, he met someone’s gaze.

“Is it he?” the woman asked, looking at the youth, who stared in turn at black eyes sunk in high cheekbones, brilliant eyes contrasting with a face of silvery paleness; she looked at him, not realizing that from behind a web of sandy eyelashes he was watching her.

“Let me see his face,” the woman said.

The youth saw clearly now, saw the sure, arrogant movements of this woman swathed in black reclining in her litter, looking very like the nervous but motionless bird reposing on her gauntleted wrist. The man with the plaited moustache grasped the youth’s hair and jerked his face upward for the woman to see. The youth’s lusterless eyes caught the impatient movement of her head, framed by the high white wings of a wimpled headdress.

She raised her arm, covered in a full, puffed sleeve; as she spoke, her pointing finger ordered her Negroes: “Take him.”

The sound of panting echoes through the desert, an infinite breathiness that seems to come from the fog itself; then a swift, trembling body, a flash of a huge white dog that growls and throws itself against the leader’s horse; for a moment the chief is stunned; the dog leaps at his legs, drives the spikes of his collar into the belly of the man’s rearing, whinnying horse; the leader pulls his dagger from his waistband, tugs at the reins to control his mount, and aims a vicious, slashing blow at the dog’s head; the dog’s collar scratches the man’s fist, and the dog whines and falls to the ground, his sad eyes staring into the eyes of the forgotten voyager.

At nightfall an exhausted El Señor entered his tent, slumped into his chair, and drew a coverlet around his shoulders. The rain had stopped, and for several hours the servants had been out looking for Bocanegra, but instead of following the trail of the fugitive dog, the hounds stupidly circled the tent, as if the scent of their master’s dog were inseparable from that of the master. Finally El Señor, heavy of heart, resigned himself to the loss of his mastiff — and felt even more chilled.

He had begun to read his breviary when Guzmán, his sweating face and stained clothing showing signs of the prolonged hunt, parted the flap of the tent and advised El Señor that the hart had just been brought to camp. He apologized: the rain had altered the tracks; the hart had been chased and killed at some distance from the site reserved for El Señor’s pleasure.

El Señor shivered and his breviary fell to the ground; his impulse was to pick it up, he even bent forward slightly, but like a flash Guzmán was kneeling before his Lord; he picked up the book of devotions to hand to his master. From his kneeling position Guzmán, as he looked up to proffer the breviary, for an instant looked directly at El Señor, and he must have arched an eyebrow in a manner that offended his Liege; but El Señor could find no fault in his servant’s celerity in demonstrating his obedience and respect; the visible act was that of the perfect vassal, although the secret intent of that glance lent itself, and all the more for being ill-defined, to interpretations El Señor wished both to accept and to forget.

Guzmán’s wound grazed the wound on El Señor’s hand; the handkerchiefs that bound them were of very different quality, but the scratches caused by a spiked collar were identical.

El Señor arose and Guzmán, not waiting for his Lord to express his intention — would he continue reading? would he come out to the fire? — already held the Biscayan cloak in his hands, ready to assist his master.

“I did well to bring a cloak,” El Señor commented.

“The good huntsman never trusts the weather,” said Guzmán.

El Señor stood motionless as his chief huntsman placed the cape about his shoulders. Then Guzmán, bowing deferentially, again lifted the tent flap and waited for El Señor, face hidden beneath the hood, to step out to the blazing bonfires. El Señor left the tent, then paused before the body of the hart stretched on the ground before his feet.

One of the huntsmen, knife in hand, approached the hart. El Señor looked at Guzmán; Guzmán raised a hand: the huntsman tossed his dagger and the lieutenant caught it in the air. He knelt beside the hart and with one swift, sure motion of the hunting knife slashed the throat from ear to ear.

He cut off the horns and then slit the skin above the rear hoofs, breaking the joints to expose the tendons.