NINETEEN

THE LIGHT SHONE from the house’s second-floor windows, but, as I predicted, the downstairs was dark. The servants were upstairs attending the swine who stole my property.

I led Lizardi through the back gate to the stable doors as if I owned the property, which in my own mind, I still did. Four horses were inside. Two, which I didn’t recognize, probably belonged to my cousins. The other two I knew intimately: Tempest and a smaller gelding I named Brass, after his color.

We saddled my two mounts. At first Tempest shied away from me, stamping from the strange smell I brought with me, but I soon calmed him down with the purr of my voice and a caress of my hand.

I grabbed two machetes from the tack room and a long knife for myself. Pistols and muskets I had kept upstairs in the house, but I kept a bag of black powder hanging in the tack room. I hooked it onto my saddle horn. The only spurs available were vaqueros’ iron rowels, which we put on.

I had Lizardi mount first. “I’ll lead my horse to open the street gate and close the gate after we get through. Keep your horse at a slow walk on the street. We don’t want to attract attention.”

I led Tempest to the stable doors and opened them. And stopped in my tracks. A big black mongrel faced me. The beast growled, barked, and came at me with snapping, slavering teeth. Tempest reared up. I couldn’t reach my knives to dispatch the cur. The dog backed away from the stallion, but howled loud enough to wake the damned. As I mounted Tempest, the dog continued his barking fang-bared attack. My recurring nightmare about the hounds of hell had reached back and bit me.

I gave Tempest the spurs, and he leaped forward. As we shot out the stable doors, a man came running down the stairs to the house, carrying a musket.

“Stop! Thief!”

He leveled the musket at me, and I jerked the reins, sending Tempest at him. He got out of the way, the musket going off, the ball flying skyward. I turned Tempest and took him to the gate, with the hellhound now snapping at Lizardi. I kicked the street gate open and flew out, struggling to keep control of the stallion. Lizardi suddenly shot out of the gate, the dog barking at the rear hooves of his horse and biting his flanks. Wheeling around, I returned to the cur. Unlimbering a machete, I sent his soul back to hell, where I’m convinced I will meet him again.

Tempest flew down the street, passing Lizardi’s horse.

Street dogs by the score began a chorus, like all the banshees in Hades howling to get out. People flocked to doors, porches, and windows. As our horses galloped on the cobblestones, their horseshoes struck sparks, and they barely maintained their footing. I had to pull Tempest in, to keep him from slipping and going down.

Now a second dog, a densely spotted monster big as a mastiff, was giving chase. Leaping up beside me, he missed my leg but bit through the bag of black power. Ripping it open, its contents covered the canine’s face, causing the cur to drop back.

I spurred Tempest north out of the city, and Lizardi followed. Behind me I heard him yell, “You son of a whore, this is not the way to Méjico City! You lied to me again. You have no honor! You’re a lépero devil!”

Ay, I could see that this was to be my fate in life: to have a hound of hell constantly howling at my heels and to lie my way through life. While the circumstances of my departure from the city had not been entirely to my satisfaction, I had no intention of heading toward the capital. The most heavily traveled road in New Spain, it would also be the most watched. Instead, I headed in the opposite direction.

Besides, our uproarious departure would rouse legions of constables—the human equivalent of hellish hounds—and I was starting to suspect that the worm, like myself, was born under an unlucky star.

We rode a league north by the light of the moon until we were stopped by the gates of a mining hacienda. I turned us east, and we rode another league. When the terrain became too dark and rough to risk a fall by a horse, I told the grumbling Lizardi to halt and bed on the ground with his horse blanket.

“This ground is harder than the stones we slept on in jail,” he whined. “It’s cold, and we have nothing to eat.”

“You would complain to St. Pedro about the comforts of heaven.” I got down on my hands and knees and kissed the ground. “This is free ground—no stocks, chains, floggings, or lice.”

“We will be poisoned by snakes and mauled by jaguars.”

I shut my ears, lay on my back, and stared up at the night sky, my head on Tempest’s saddle. Unlike Lizardi, I was used to sleeping on hard ground, having done so on my hunting trips, though I’d always had food in my stomach and a fire to warm my feet.

As I stared up at the night sky, I said, “Tomorrow is a new day.”

“What kind of mindless remark is that? Every day is a new day.”

“I have spent the first twenty-five years of my life as Juan de Zavala, gachupine caballero in the Bajío. Tomorrow I will be someone else, and who knows where my feet will take me?”

“You will go back to Guanajuato feet first if the king’s constables catch up with us.”