6

A large raven flew into the barn and perched on an empty stall. Kro-ak, kro-ak. The bird rattled, weirdly liquid, and Teresa woke from her second sleep of the day. The raven turned its dark eye on her and croaked again before flapping with a dramatic flutter of wings outside into the summer sunshine. Teresa agreed. It was time. She was stronger now, having rested a full day and drunk her pot of soup and all her pots of water. She should stand now and go outside and find something more to eat.

She still wore her stained cotton shirt and leather skirt. She found her yucca sandals and staggered out the barn door, feeling the weakness of her legs as she followed the bird past the garden and into the courtyard. There she stopped, paused, and returned to the rooms by the kitchen where she had kept her last two patients. They were gone. Perhaps they had died and the Christians taken their bodies. Perhaps they had recovered and left on their own. She no longer had any responsibility here.

Unsteady, she walked into the village, where the dirt path was rutted and she had to be careful not to fall. She was thirsty again, and the light rash on her chest burned and itched. Just as Fray Tomás had said, the village was empty. Teresa looked about with interest, in part because she had been to the village so seldom, rarely leaving her kitchen and garden. The small adobe houses stood silently, surrounded by small yards of maize and beans, the ears ripening, the pods dangling unpicked from the vines. No one was in the blacksmith shop or the woodshop where the Indians had learned to make Spanish chairs, tables, and beds. The door to the whitewashed chapel was open, the twisted heart carved into wood. Here there was only more silence, and Teresa didn’t stop to look inside.

But she paused before the building that had been the friar’s school, wondering if there were any children who needed care and forcing herself to go in. Only Fray Tomás lay sprawled on the floor, one hand clutching his torn brown robe. From the black blood, Teresa knew the monk had been visited by tabardillo, a friend to sarampión. She was not surprised. She had seen this in her visions.

She hurried out of the foul-smelling room onto the dirt street, where the sky was turning darker blue and the shadows in the yards deepening. Ahead, a second raven perched on a post in front of an adobe house, its roof made of cane and woven leaves. The bird cawed, agitated. A Spanish man appeared in the doorway. He and Teresa stared at each other.

“Go on,” the man said. “Get out of here.”

The raven flew down the path, and Teresa followed. So a few people were still alive. They waited in their homes for the pestilence to pass. As she walked on, slowly, two more houses showed signs of life. In each case, a man came out and stared at her, afraid she had come because she was sick and needed help.

Teresa walked through the village, and then she left the village and the Governor’s house and the Governor’s kitchen behind her. She would never go back, never see them again. She was walking north along a well-worn path. She was searching for a stream where she could drink and wash herself and her clothes.

Soon she began to notice the animals. A large king snake, brown as chocolate, slithered in front of her flicking its tail. This was the snake that ate other snakes, even rattlesnakes and the poisonous banded coral. A family of deer accompanied her for half a league, picking their way through the thorny brush where she could hear the brittle snapping of twigs. Sometimes they scrambled ahead so that she saw their rumps in a flash of white. Lizards darted across the trail, scurried here and there, here and there, here and there, and then watched her from a stone or root. Some had streaks of brilliant blue around their throat and bright orange on their belly. Birds flitted through the air like falling leaves, branch to branch, tree to tree, more birds than Teresa had ever seen before. She knew some of them from her hours in the Governor’s garden: jays and gnatcatchers, wrens and robins, doves and finches. A flock of parrots flew like a green cloud in the darkening sky. Quail rustled in the grass.

As Teresa walked further into the summer night, she saw cuckoos and heard the whoooo of owls. Finally she found the stream she knew would be there, what the farmers used to irrigate their fields, and she drank and cleaned herself, scrubbing away the stains of sickness. Tired, she made a bed off the path, near the water. A wolf called another wolf in a valley beyond. From the ground, Teresa could feel the warmth of small mammals, mice and packrats, sleeping in burrows. Her stomach growled. The new abundance of animals seemed to answer back, growling and rustling. She went to sleep, and the animals ran through her dreams, winding like ribbons over her breasts and arms and legs, winding through her hair. She felt the stirring of her old life, when this had been normal, when the world had been alive in her body.

The next morning, she reached another village. Some of the houses smelled of rotting flesh, and she did not enter these. But one house had only the fragrance of pink roses planted as a hedge around the yard, and in this kitchen, she found food, her mouth watering at the sight of dried meal not yet eaten by mice, dried jerky in a sealed clay jar, and dried chilies hanging from a nail. She opened all the cupboards and filled a leather saddlebag also left behind.

Oh—she smiled when she found that bag, for it had a pocket that contained treasure. Teresa recognized the tinderbox immediately, small and wooden and carved with a simple floral design. Inside were a piece of flint, a curved piece of steel, and tiny pieces of prepared oilcloth. Now she could make a fire whenever she wanted.

This village and the one close by were completely abandoned. Not everyone had died. There weren’t enough bodies. But the survivors had gone, leaving their dead just as Teresa had left hers in the Governor’s courtyard. When the bodies in a house were old and dry enough, she went inside to look for more food. Most of the corpses lay on pallets and had their faces covered. Only a few had been left to die alone, without anyone or anything by their side.

Strangely confident, the animals wandered through the villages, too, as easily as they wandered through the forest. Teresa saw skunks and raccoons, coatis and opossum, rabbits and hares. Lying on the roof of one house, a mountain lion stretched out comfortably, eying her as she walked by. In the orchards of apples and pears and plums, in the fields of maize and beans and squash, pigs and cattle also roamed at their ease.

Occasionally she saw signs of people. In the dirt, there would be footprints, the litter from a recently eaten meal or the remains of a campfire. Once she heard voices in the distance, but she did not go toward them.

Outside the third village, the last adobe house smelled clean, the neatly swept dirt in the yard littered with fallen grass from the sagging roof. A tall yucca grew by the door, the spiky leaves at its base trailing threads that could be twisted into rope, the thick stalk rising up in an abundance of white flowers. Here, too, someone had planted pink and red roses, which bloomed in a fragrant mass of scent. Teresa stood and breathed in the perfume. She felt reassured. Beyond a corner of the house, blue sky showed with the brilliance of late afternoon, her second full day of traveling. Teresa adjusted the saddlebag slung across her shoulder. She wanted to scavenge quickly and be gone.

Inside the house, the first room contained nothing but broken pots smashed into pieces and scattered on the ground. In the second room, a back door let in a shaft of light in which the dust motes seemed to hold still like a solid thing in the air. Here Teresa caught that familiar odor, not of death but sickness, cámaras de sangre or bloody stools. Someone groaned along the wall, and a bundle of rags shifted before flinging itself into that solid shaft of dust and light. Teresa shrank back as a hand fell out of the bundle, then an arm, and the woman on the floor groaned again. Against her breast, she clutched a dead child.

Now a man’s body blocked the back doorway. He spoke in Spanish, “What? What do you want?”

Teresa shook her head. She didn’t want anything.

“You can’t help her,” the man said as he went to the woman and rearranged her limbs. Patiently he folded the dead child back into her arms. He turned and stared at Teresa, his eyes focused on something else. Suddenly he sounded angry. “I am taking care of her. Are you a priest?”

Still shaking her head, Teresa moved slowly to the open back door, ducked, and was out and walking fast past a ramada of ocotillo branches, long limbs of a spidery cactus with needle-sharp thorns and red flowers. At a wooden post, a horse stood with a bloody muzzle where the halter had cut his skin. The ground around the horse’s hooves was pawed bare from his attempts to break free, but the rope tied to his halter and the post had knotted firm and held fast. As she rushed by, Teresa glanced over. She could count the animal’s ribs.

Unexpectedly, the gelding spoke: help me.

Teresa was in a hurry to get away from the crazy Spanish slave hunter. But when the gelding’s image and voice formed in her mind, she stood still. It had been a long time. She had stopped speaking and stopped listening, and the plants and animals had stopped speaking and listening to her, too. The world had gone silent. Still, now, she could hear this horse. Something had happened when she was sick and feverish. A bar on the door had fallen away. The door had opened a crack, and now the door was swinging wide.

Inside the house, the horse’s master tended his sick wife and dead child. He had forgotten everything else. He had abandoned everything else. He had left his horse to die of thirst and hunger.

Help me, the gelding repeated. He loved me once. He cared for me.

The animal grieved for his master’s sanity.

I need water! Suddenly the horse shied, spraying drops of blood and mucus, bursting to life. Untie me! Untie me now!

And Teresa did, as quickly as she could, although the rope had been pulled and tightened so fast to the post that her fingers were soon bruised. When the brown horse was finally free, he trotted off in another burst of energy, the rope trailing and jerking behind like a frenzied snake. Teresa knew the animal was rushing to the nearest stream outside the village. She followed him there, running for the first time in years, the saddlebag bouncing against her back.

After he had finished drinking, the gelding flared his nostrils and swung his head toward her, ears flattened. What do you want? the horse asked sullenly, echoing his master.

Teresa studied the well-proportioned body with its deep chest and long neck. What did she want? she asked herself. When she concentrated, she could catch more scattered images of the gelding’s life. She could see the Spanish hidalgo, outfitted in metal armor, so proud of himself and his handsome mount. They had been in battle together. They had killed men together. They had crossed the ocean together. Every night, the man rubbed the horse and gave him grain. He rubbed the long neck and whispered fond words.

The horse missed his master and ached to go back to him.

You can’t go back, Teresa said—although not out loud. He won’t even see you. He has forgotten you.

Yes, the horse agreed, still sullen. He is not my master anymore. He has become unhinged, crazed with grief and sorrow. In the grip of madness, he has betrayed his vows to himself and the captain he followed here for gold and silver, even as death has betrayed him.

Teresa blinked. The flavor of this animal’s mind was distinct. She had not heard this kind of speech for some time. In the kitchen, they spoke less pompously. Even Fray Tomás had been a simple man of simple words.

I want you to take me north, she said. I have a long way to go, and it will take me weeks if I have to walk.

The horse shook his mane and rolled his eyes. Only my master rides me!

Teresa knew that tone, too. The pride, the arrogance.

Death has betrayed your master, she reminded the animal. He is not the same man. And I need you. I have a task for you.

You are a female, the horse protested. You are an Indian.

But he seemed unsure of himself.

How dare you? Teresa shrilled in return, trying to sound haughty. My great-grandfather was Pedro de Vera, the conqueror of the Grand Canary! My father was Cabeza de Vaca, treasurer of the Pánfilo de Narváez expedition! I come from a line of noblemen, hidalgos, and conquistadors.

The horse was impressed. But still reluctant.

I don’t mean right away, Teresa said more kindly. You should graze first. You should rest first. I’ll wait here, and then we will walk on together. We will go slowly as you regain your strength and calm.

Shaking his ears, the horse blew air through his nostrils and bent to pull at the sweet grass by the stream. Teresa moved away, breaking the connection between them. She wanted to think and plan alone. She coveted the gelding’s deep chest and muscular legs. She coveted his ability to walk without tiring, twenty leagues a day. She felt the need to hurry, the wise woman calling to her, the wise woman who wanted to see her, who had something to tell her. What you have lost will be restored to you.

Teresa scratched at the remaining spots on her stomach. It would be easy enough for the horse to go wild in the orchards full of ripening fruit and fields full of ripening maize. She had to convince the animal now, while he was still tame.

She crept closer and stooped for the rope trailing in the grass.

What are you doing? the horse jerked.

Nothing, Teresa soothed. I am going to loop this over your neck and knot it so it doesn’t catch on a bush. I am going to wet my cotton shirt, like this, and wash the cuts on your face.

And you will groom me later? the horse asked. He shivered, despite the heat.

I will make a comb out of sticks, Teresa promised. Eat now, and I will wash you, and I will groom you.

Huffing, confused, the horse dropped his head.

They walked on, the gelding moving slowly, still weak. When the first stars began to appear in the sky, Teresa found a place to camp, and that night she used the tinderbox, striking the flint hard against steel. The sparks caught in the tiny piece of oiled cloth and burned red. Quickly she put the cloth in a bird’s nest with bits of her hair and blew—gentle puffs. Soon she had a fire to admire as she ate her dried jerky. The horse seemed used to the flames and came close as if to watch them, too. Teresa made a bed of grass for herself, while the horse said he would sleep standing up.

What should I call you? Teresa asked.

My master had a name for me, the horse flared. No one but he can use it. You can call me Horse.

That’s fine, Teresa said.

You are not my master, the horse insisted.

I know, Teresa soothed him.

She wondered if she should tie the animal up for the night, if he would allow her to do that. She decided he would not. Not yet.

She lay down to sleep.

Did you hear that noise? Horse asked in a few moments, pricking his ears forward.

It’s only a skunk, Teresa mumbled. There are so many animals now, everywhere.

I think this one is watching us, Horse whispered. This one has been following us.

Following us? Teresa tried to peer into the darkness, blacker against the light of the campfire. Suddenly she had the same feeling, as though it had been passed to her from the cautious animal. The horse ninnied, a sharp eerie sound. Teresa felt eyes on her skin. Yes, Horse was right. Someone was following them.