14

All that day, she urged the horse forward even though he was tired from yesterday’s travel, even though Pomo was cranky and restless, even though her head ached and her eyes felt as if they had been rubbed with sand. Let’s go, Teresa said when the horse slowed. The desert is what he is avoiding. He can’t cross the desert after us.

That is not true, the horse replied. You know that is not true.

Teresa frowned because Horse was right. Why would Plague hate the desert—except that the desert had so few people. And Plague needed people. Plague loved people.

The wise woman will help us, she said confidently to the gelding. We have to find her before Plague finds us again and thinks of some new trick. We have to cross this desert before we die of thirst. Hurry! she commanded over the pain of her headache.

Horse neighed angrily. I know how fast I can go in this heat!

“I want to get off,” Pomo said, drumming his feet against the horse’s ribs. “I don’t want to ride anymore.”

“Hush,” Teresa said, “Horse is scenting for water.”

They were all so thirsty. The desert blazed so much hotter than the mountains, and they had left the stream before they had had a chance to drink. Teresa could feel the bare skin burning on her arms and face and sandaled feet, and she knew the same thing was happening to Pomo, who was completely naked. She should make Horse stop so that she could give Pomo her cotton shirt stained with prickly pear juice. She should find Pomo some clothes of his own, and she wondered what happened to the cotton shirts and yucca sandals of the Mayan shamans when they shape-shifted. Did they tear and break and tangle in the jaguar’s limbs? Did the shape-shifting jaguar run through the forest wearing the rags of a leather skirt? Stupid, Teresa scolded herself. The shamans undressed first. They had rituals. They knew what to do. Oh, it was so hot!

They rode past cholla and ocotillo and the short humped cactus. Teresa craned her neck looking for prickly pear. That would save them. The fruits of the tall-limbed cactus were also beginning to ripen, and she searched for those plants as well.

In the late afternoon, the horse found a spring. The seep of water was surrounded by clumps of yellow grass and animal tracks hardened in drying mud. After drinking her fill, Teresa went to search for food and found a few red currant berries. On a nearby hill, a jojoba bush had ripened nuts, crunchy and oily. She and Pomo ate those and drank again from the tiny seep and then Teresa was eager to move on—to cross the desert and find the wise woman.

But the horse refused to travel further that day. He needed rest.

In the morning, he went reluctantly and only because he had grazed all the dry yellow grass. There was nothing left for him to eat.

“I don’t want to ride,” Pomo said as Teresa lifted the boy onto the horse’s back. Teresa’s cotton shirt covered him now from neck to feet, and Teresa was in a bad mood with only her leather skirt and dabs of mud protecting her bare breasts. Her efforts to find a buffalo gourd had failed, and they still had no way to carry water. Despite all the tracks near the seep, she hadn’t seen a rabbit or packrat or anything to stone for their supper or breakfast. All the currant berries and jojoba nuts were gone. Like Horse, they had nothing to eat.

“We’ll find something later,” she muttered to herself.

“I want to get off,” Pomo began though they had not yet started.

The day seemed even more miserably hot than the day before, and with each hour, they were thirstier and hungrier, their rumps and thighs chafed and bruised bumping against Horse’s bony back. A heat rash broke out on the boy’s face, and he complained continuously. The sun beat down like something that hated them. The air felt thick and solid. Mirages shimmered in the shape of towering buildings or mountains or blue ponds just ahead. But none of these things were real. The ponds, especially, were not real.

By sunset, Horse had not yet smelled water. He shambled along, step, step, step, stumble, stumble, stumble. Teresa could feel his exhaustion. We should stop, she said at last.

No, the horse whispered, surprising her. We will use the moonlight. We should keep going. Teresa swayed on the gelding’s back, holding on to Pomo. Here and there, she spotted the humped barrel cactus. She knew that a thirsty traveler could break open this plant and use its pulp for liquid. But if they drank the mashed pulp on an empty stomach, they would get even sicker, defecating dirty water. They needed food first.

She swayed and dreamed of a pool below a cottonwood tree.

Once again, moonlight silvered the desert plants and rocks. It was beautiful and familiar, as if she had seen all this before, the silver moon, these silver plants. Of course, she had—she remembered now—not on a horse, not with a boy, but with her father and Andrés Dorantes and Alonso del Castillo and the Moor Esteban. They had often walked by moonlight, her father humming a Spanish song. Río de Sevilla, de barco lleno, ha pasado el alma, no pasa el cuerpo . . .

Horse plodded through the night, and when the sun rose, he said he had to find shade. He could no longer travel in the daylight. The horse stumbled to the overhang of a boulder that half-sheltered a scraggly mesquite tree. Once Teresa and the boy dismounted, she realized that they would not be riding again. The animal was at the end of his strength. He could barely speak to her, his thoughts blurred. They would have to walk now.

Teresa wondered, with shame, if she should have offered to do this earlier. She wondered how easily, how quickly, the horse would be traveling through the desert if he were not carrying them.

Pomo whispered something in a cracked voice as they settled under the tree branches, leaving the shade of the boulder for the horse. The boy was pleading for water, water and food. Teresa looked about, but all the mesquite beans had fallen to the ground and been eaten by animals. The horse stood nearby, too tired to try the tough yellow grass that grew up sparsely.

“It’s all right,” Teresa lied to the boy. “Go to sleep.”

Pomo coughed and she saw it—a glimmer of yellow in the boy’s dark eyes, a shading into liquid green-gold. The child was thirsty and hungry enough to change. Now Teresa could hear the animal’s voice. I have you, and I have the horse, the jaguar counted up his treasure. Plenty of flesh, plenty of blood.

No! Teresa shouted. Horse jerked awake.

No, Teresa said, and with all her strength she pushed the jaguar down deep into the boy. She denied him. She stopped his breath. She strangled him half to death, or maybe all the way to death, for he disappeared—growling. He could not have the boy. He could not have her. He could not have the horse.

“We will find another way,” she told Pomo.

The dark eyes lost their shine and only Pomo looked back at her, wet-lashed, woe-be-gone, trusting. “Go to sleep,” she repeated.

And they all slept then, half-waking and sleeping again, half-sleeping, scratching and full of aches and pain. The horse’s skin shivered with flies that also bothered Teresa, tickling her face and buzzing in her ear. When the shade from the overhanging rock moved with the sun, the horse moved with it, crowding closer to the tree, his body radiating more heat.

Near dawn, the coolest part of the day, Teresa dreamed she was lying next to a fire. If she didn’t push it away, she would burn up. This was worse than the Governor’s kitchen, worse than a summer full of baking turkeys and ducks and bread. She pushed out with her hands, strangely unafraid of the red coals or yellow-orange flames. She beat the fire down—and woke to find herself hitting Pomo, shoving him out of the shade and into the sun. The little boy didn’t care. He didn’t even moan. Shocked, Teresa dragged his body back under the tree. Fever had made his skin hot to touch. He was the fire.

Desperately, Teresa looked about at the horse, at the boulder, at the blue sky. No, no, she thought. She couldn’t bear it.

Now someone was coming for her, across the desert, weaving through the needled cactus and mesquite. Someone was shouting her name, “Teresa! Teresa!”

Teresa began to cry silently, for it was her father. The lone figure was Cabeza de Vaca. As the man came closer, she saw that he had aged terribly after his years in the south as the Governor of the Río de la Plata, after his own men of arms had rebelled against him. His beard and hair were completely white, his skin mottled like old leather. Still his pale blue eyes were the same, and his long nose, and most of all, his wonderful voice.

“Teresa!” he called. “I have been looking for you. I have been calling and calling out for you, seeking you wherever I go. Praise the Heavenly Father! I have never been so happy. My greatest wish has come true.”

Her father was here at last. She had always known he would come back for her.

“Teresa,” he said, and she wanted only to get up and run to him. She wanted only to be held in his arms.