9

Teresa called him Boy although she knew he must have his own name, a Mayan one, at least, given to him by his mother and father. But Boy seemed easiest for now, and the boy seemed to agree. He didn’t want to talk about the past. He gnawed ferociously on the leftover rabbit bones and then wanted something more. Teresa searched through her saddlebag and found a remaining slender squash that she had gathered earlier from a field.

The child made a face. “I like meat.”

“I can see that,” Teresa said. “Try this, and we’ll get more meat, too.”

Could the boy control his change into the jaguar, she wondered, or did that happen without warning? Did it happen when he was hungry?

Now the boy took such small bites of the vegetable that he looked like a mouse, nibbling delicately, his nose wrinkling with distaste. His teeth were white and strong, bigger, perhaps, than other children’s teeth.

“Do you like fish?” Teresa asked, trying not to smile. She knew he would.

She cut away the rope halter from the gelding’s muzzle. Then she unbraided the rope and made a misshapen and rough net, which she hoped would hold a trout for long enough to throw it on the bank. She and the boy walked down to pools that looked promising and got lucky at the second hole, where a fish drowsed unwary in the shadows. Teresa scooped it up as the tail flapped, and the trout almost slipped away until the net caught its nose again. Shouting with excitement, Teresa threw the entire thing into the air, and then the fish was in a bush, still flapping. The boy ran to club it with a rock.

“Good!” Teresa praised.

The boy danced, stomping his feet and lifting his chubby arms. With his chest puffed out, he grinned down at the fish. “We caught you,” he said, and that was so obvious that Teresa almost smiled again.

It took much longer to catch a second fish. The net broke. The boy got bored and began to play a game in which he thrashed the yellow flowers on the bank with a stick, knocking off their petals and yelling in Spanish, “Get to work! Get to work!”

He must have seen such hidalgos and slave hunters, Teresa thought, in the place where he had lived before, perhaps in the silver mines or a garrison at some Spanish outpost. She doubted his parents had been slaves themselves in these mines. The child seemed too healthy, without scars and without a brand. More likely, they had been servants like herself, working in the kitchen, where there was lots of extra food. How had they managed to keep the boy’s secret? Was his mother a jaguar-woman, too, and his father a jaguar-man, shape-shifters and shamans? And where were those parents now? Were they still alive? Teresa suspected not. She didn’t think a mother would willingly leave a child so young and foolish and inexperienced.

“Be quiet,” she ordered, without much success. At first, the boy would stop, and then in a few minutes, he would be bored again and thrashing flowers and yelling and dancing.

“This is not good for hunting,” Teresa grumbled. “Come here now. Help me with this.” She listened critically to her words. Yes, she still sounded rusty, her throat muscles stiff, her mouth awkward. Even so, the child understood and came to squat beside her. With two hands, she reached into a dark place where water had eroded the root-tangled bank. When she felt the ridged back of something slimy, she let the broken net spread, entangling the fish. The boy leaned over to see better, his hair brushing her cheek.

Suddenly, too close to her ear, Teresa heard a shriek and then water was in her nose. The boy had fallen in! He wailed and splashed, but Teresa kept her balance and kept hold of the fish, knowing that the pool wasn’t very deep. The fish sailed up and plopped a good distance away on the dirt. Satisfied, she jumped into the water and grabbed the boy and held him up so he wouldn’t drown. Then, without thinking, she made him laugh by tickling his stomach. His lips stretched wide and his dark eyes crinkled, and this made Teresa laugh back and soon they were both laughing and splashing so much that all the fish here were well warned and hidden. Teresa didn’t mind. They could always walk farther down the stream. They could always find another pool.

She couldn’t remember when she had laughed like this before. Of course, the cooks and the assistant cooks had laughed in the kitchen, telling jokes about the balding Fray Tomás and sometimes, more quietly, about the housekeeper. She had also seen girls giggling at chapel, whispering and poking when they should have been quiet. Once she had heard the housekeeper laugh genuinely at a handsome male gardener clowning for an extra pastry. And Fray Tomás often chuckled at something he said to himself or to his God or that his God said to him.

The memories sobered her, and she made the boy get out of the water, returning to the campfire with two fish to eat and two to save for later in the day. Teresa cooked these until the skins were burnt and wrapped them in wet leaves. Then she filled the leather bag with watercress. It was already afternoon. She was ready to continue the journey north to find the wise woman.

But Horse wouldn’t let the boy ride him. Never, the horse said. That’s how jaguars do it. They jump on a horse’s back, rake his flesh, and bite his neck. It doesn’t take long. You bleed to death. Hell on your back! Ridden by the Devil! Your cries of agony resound in your ears.

Teresa could only suppose that the horse’s master had talked like this, too.

No, she said firmly. I don’t think so. He is not going to turn back into a jaguar. He is human now. Aren’t you? she turned to the boy and asked. The child only stared and said nothing, so that Teresa understood the boy was like her father and the housekeeper and Fray Tomás and everyone else. He couldn’t hear them speaking, horse to human, human to horse.

Never, Horse repeated. I was raised in the sweet perfume of the sweetest city in Spain. I have fought in foreign wars and sailed across the sea and slept in the stable of the Viceroy of Mexico City. I don’t carry Mayan slaves.

For emphasis, the horse moved forward, reached out, and nipped the boy on the upper arm. The boy screamed. Horse! Teresa was shocked. The horse neighed and trounced away. The boy kept screaming until his soft chocolate-brown face turned purple. The skin on his arm had been broken, and a few drops of blood slid to the ground. But when Teresa tried to look at the bite, the child gnashed his teeth, and she jumped back.

“Ma . . . Ma! Ma . . . Ma! Mamá!”

So they were back to that.

Horse chuckled.

Teresa wondered how everything had slipped so quickly out of control.

When the boy calmed down—and that took some time—the horse agreed to walk beside them as they continued north. He would not carry them. He would only accompany them. Teresa felt tired in a different way from the tiredness of chopping vegetables and making tortillas and sweeping floors all day. Life was much easier when you lived alone and had no one but yourself. That’s how it had been in the Governor’s kitchen. Surrounded by people, she had still been alone, blessedly alone, never having to soothe and argue, pet and cajole, talk and convince.

Slowly, slowly, slowly, they followed the path to the next village as the boy ambled along on his short legs. Climbing a bit higher, they left the fields and orchards behind, with stunted pine trees now lining the way, mixed with oak and needled juniper. Teresa thought that she would never reach the wise woman at this rate. She was worse off now than before she had met Horse.

The yellowing sun had begun to drop and they only had a few hours more of light, when she felt eyes again on her skin and sensed an intelligence watching her from the branches of a rough-barked tree. She stopped, swiveled, and stared.

Horse felt it, too. He was also surprised. So it wasn’t the jaguar-boy, he said.

“What do you want? Get out of here!” Teresa called out. The tangle of scrub oak and grass and juniper revealed nothing. They were the only three travelers on the path that stretched before and behind them.

Teresa tried again. “Who are you? What do you want?” But whoever had found them did not want to be found.

Let’s go, Teresa said to the horse. “We have to hurry!” she scolded the boy.

Now the horse went ahead because he could smell water and scent out their next campsite. The boy walked in the middle, a prudent distance from the horse’s back hooves, and Teresa brought up the rear, her skin crawling and senses alert. When they passed a fork in the trail, the horse wanted to take it to the valley below with its village and fields. But Teresa told him to keep climbing on the path that took them north, and soon they came to a spring edged with green grass and small blue flowers. As she and the boy ate a supper of wrapped fish, the horse grazed. No one spoke much. Without further discussion, she and the horse took turns guarding the fire.

The next morning, they started out again, climbing again, the way steeper now as it angled up the mountain slope. Almost immediately, the boy complained that his legs were tired. Teresa said his legs couldn’t be tired so soon. They were barely out of camp. But the boy said his legs were tired, very tired, and he couldn’t walk another step.

The horse stopped. What? Teresa snapped. Then she also felt eyes—the watcher, the person or animal or thing. She also turned to study the trees behind them, the space between bushes. It’s still here, Horse said.

Yes, it’s even closer.

The horse’s ears went back.

The boy whined, “I don’t want to walk!”

Teresa stared down the path. A black thread of smoke curled through a pine tree. Do you see that? she asked the horse.

It’s our campfire, the horse said. The smoke uncurled until it rose up into a straight line, a thin black column. The column began to widen, thicker and thicker, filling the path like a solid wall. The solid wall began to move.

Now they both understood. The wall of black was fear, and fear was moving toward them on the path, gathering speed.

Teresa couldn’t help herself. She whimpered. The horse squealed and shied, striking out with his hooves, just missing the boy’s head. Terror exploded in Teresa’s chest, paralyzing, then galvanizing her. She grabbed the horse’s brown mane. Take us away! she pleaded. You have to take us away! Even as she spoke, she was reaching with one hand to pick up the boy and throw him onto the horse’s back.

The horse startled and trembled. But his master had taught him this, too: you didn’t leave your comrades behind. If your master was wounded, you waited for him to mount you. If there were wounded or horseless men on the field, your master waited and helped them mount.

Yes, Horse snorted, eyes a half-moon of white. Hurry!

Teresa slung the boy, who was crying and yelling, and then pulled herself up—she didn’t know how. The leather bag bounced hard against her shoulder. She gripped the horse with her knees and entwined her fingers in his mane and flattened her body to cover the child and hold him to the horse. Go, go! she commanded, and the horse turned clumsily, trying not to dislodge her. He lifted his muscled legs and breathed in and ran up the path, away from the wall of fear.

Teresa concentrated on not falling, on not letting the boy fall.