Days of the Dead

by Barbara Hambly

  “As indeed you are. Dulce et decorum est . . .”

  “Huitzilopochtli, now, the left-handed hummingbird, he was the one they had to fear.” The old Don nudged his mount over closer to January’s, and shook his horsehair quirt at the two friends. “He needed blood—great quantities of it—if the sun was to rise the next day, and I must say it seems to have worked, because the sun rose on schedule and has continued to rise ever since. What they’ll do when the laid-up surplus is spent, I have no notion.” From beneath the wide brim of his glazed leather hat his too-brilliant eyes glared like blue topaz. “They sacrificed dogs as well, you know. Ate them, of course, too. Rather than sacrifice a full-sized and perfectly edible dog, they bred them specially for sacrifice, down to the size of rats. Disgusting little brutes. Isabella has them. God knows why Anastasio lets her keep them. Treats them like babies, talks to them—I daresay if Isabella had babies of her own, she’d get rid of them quick enough. One day I’ll break the neck of that little brute of Valla’s.”

  They dismounted in the open space that lay at the foot of the Pyramid of the Dead, close by the remains of two broken statues that had once flanked a stair. Huge eyes and incised feathers decorated the domed head that poked up through the tangle of weeds and earth on one side; on the other, all that remained was a broken mass, and a toothed jaguar grin.

  “There’s a crypt cut into the heart of that one,” said Don Prospero, pointing his quirt up at a leveling of the ground three-quarters of the way to the top. “He’s still in there, Mictlantecuhtli, Lord of the Land of the Dead. They’d tear out the heart before him, and throw the body down the steps to the people who waited here where we stand. Come along, fool,” he added sharply as Don Rafael showed signs of sinking down onto the broken guardian-statue to rest.

  The town-bred hacendado leaped immediately to his feet and started after Don Prospero, then halted—presumably when he recalled Valentina’s presence—and turned back toward her horse just as Hannibal helped her from the saddle. Don Rafael wavered, as if debating whether he should go back to her and offer her his arm, for the hill was quite steep. But Don Prospero snapped at him again, and he hastened to follow.

  “I shall die!” groaned Doña Filomena, almost melting from her perch behind Vasco, the tall chief of the vaqueros. “Oh, I must rest . . . I cannot go on. . . .”

  “You’ve only just gotten here,” snapped Don Prospero. “No lagging, now! If you cannot walk, Señora, I assure you I can arrange for you to be dragged.”

  She burst into tears and looked to Valentina for sympathy, but Valla only stood looking around her, her arms hugged about her under the short velvet manga—the beautifully decorated riding cape—that she wore. With a sniffle Doña Filomena produced a substantial silver flask from her reticule and drank from it, then stumbled after Don Prospero and his daughter.

  “My name is Ozymandias, King of Kings,” murmured Hannibal, pausing to contemplate the staring eye of the Serpent-God at the foot of the pyramid. “Look on my works, ye mighty, and despair.” He produced a flask of his own—laudanum-laced sherry—and set off in Prospero’s wake, January walking thoughtfully behind.

  “Mostly the Spanish destroyed everything they found here,” declaimed Prospero as he led the way straight up the steep, brushy slope. “There used to be little temples on the tops of all of these—you’ll see.” His blithe harsh voice chopped at the hush of the forenoon. From somewhere in the dry tangle of creosote bush and yellowing weeds near-by came the rattle of an insect, the skitter of a fleeing hare or fox. Sopilotes circled, tiny as imaginary specks in the vision, deep in the well of the sky. Under the white glare of the sun, the pyramids loomed eerily, fragments of carving peering from among the rough-barked junipers. On one section of frieze, twisted human torsos cut into the stone in deep relief, detached arms and writhing, severed legs. Above each carved body was a carved head, curls of what looked like ribbon extruding from their half-parted lips.

  “Breath,” explained Hannibal, panting in the thin air as he climbed. “Or the songs that they sing in dying.

  All whom war, death, age, agues, tyrannies,

  Despair, law, chance hath slain. . . .”

  From the level space they had seen from below, a black cave opened into the heart of the pyramid. “The Inquisitors came here, of course.” Don Prospero strolled casually into the low tunnel that stretched into darkness; looking back down the precipitate slope, January saw the vaqueros clustered close around the horses, looking nervously over their shoulders.

  Their rifles were in their hands, not at their shoulders. It was not El Moro and his bandits that they feared.

  “’Stasio and I explored every foot of these shrines when we were boys, searching for treasure.” Yellow light flared in the darkness as Don Prospero kindled a torch. “I laugh now to think that two youths expected to uncover a treasure that would have escaped so expert a looter as Cortés.”

  January ducked as he entered the passageway, the crumbling corbels brushing the crown of his wide-brimmed hat. Ahead, the torch-light revealed more dead men carved on the brown stone of the walls, dismembered, beheaded, decapitated heads singing or breathing out their final curling ribbons of life between rows of grinning skulls. Then he stepped into the main crypt and froze. Years of rational study among the educated of Paris deserted him in one single chilling breath as he came face-to-face with the Lord of the Land of the Dead.

  Mictlantecuhtli, skeletal, crouching, grinning with the bones of his face, fleshless hands folded before the empty cavity of his belly. The horrid shape was cut into the far wall in such deep relief as to seem like almost a statue, the torch-gleam lost utterly in the twin black pits of his eyes. Parted teeth showed only a black eternal hollow. The floor of the little chamber rose at that side of the room, a broken rim showing where steps had been. At the foot of those crumbled steps, empty as the god’s shadowed eyes, a circular pit gaped, filled with bottomless shadow. Between pit-rim and outer door stood what had to have been the altar-stone, its carvings all broken, weeds growing in the crevices of its death’s-head designs.

  “Earth’s face is but thy table,” said Hannibal, sinking wearily down onto the altar and taking another sip of sherry, “there are set / Plants, cattle, men, dishes for Death to eat.”

  “We nearly broke our necks going down that cenote on a rope.” Don Prospero nodded at the black maw of the holy well. “Of course, the Spanish filled it in with rubble, centuries ago. The Indians said that Tlaloc, god of the pulp of the earth, dwelled in its depths; they’d throw virgin girls down, and gold and jewels and balls of copal incense. Me, if I’d been a priest here, you can be sure I’d have had a net stretched on the days when they were just throwing gold and jewels. Tlaloc could have the girls, for all of me. Eh, daughter?”

  He glanced wickedly at Valla, who stood beside the narrow entry of the passageway, Don Rafael fidgeting uncomfortably at her side.

  “My father was always forbidding us to come here because he said bandits lurked in the ruins,” Don Prospero continued. “I never believed him, and we never encountered any, nor even saw signs of their camps. Come on. Don’t lag. You have to see the countryside from the top.

  “Banditry is ten times now what it was—twenty times—since we kicked the Penínsularios out,” he went on as he charged up the remaining slope of the pyramid like a billygoat. “And still they won’t come here. Sometimes I ride out here alone, to watch the moon rise from the top of the pyramid, or to bring my telescope and study the stars. And in the hours before the moon rises . . . Sometimes I’ll just lie by the lip of the well and listen. And I’ll hear old Tlaloc’s voice speaking to me out of the dark.”

  The view from the top of the pyramid was breath-taking. The red-tiled roofs of the casco, the leaves of the trees in the ladies’ courtyard, the myriad corrals and pens that sprawled behind the kitchen, the gilt cross at the top of the little chapel—all these things seemed to January as if he viewed them through a microscope, perfect, distant, like mini
atures etched in glass. The rangeland spread out around the pyramids in a green-splotched symphony of dusty brown and tawny gold, slashed by arroyos where thorn and trees and brush grew thick. Close to the feet of all five pyramids on the north, a shallow depression of the ground was thick with oaks and paloverde: like the water to the south, regular in shape, the work of men’s hands.

  “The Indians said when a warrior died in battle, or a woman in childbirth, they return to this world as butterflies,” Don Prospero told them. “Myself, I think they become hummingbirds, who fight for their territory like warriors, if two want flowers from the same bush. It is the one thing that concerns me about your murdering Fernando,” he added abruptly, turning back and fixing Hannibal with one coldly staring blue eye. “He’ll be angry about dying the way he did, like a sickly woman, or a feeble child, instead of in battle like a man. I don’t know what he’ll have to say about that.”

  “Θεωυ ευ γουυασί κειτα , I suppose,” sighed the fiddler. “It lies in the lap of the gods, rather like a celestial napkin, and one can only hope death has given him some perspective on the matter. Not that Fernando was ever one to take notice of perspective before.”

  “Do not jest, my friend.” Don Prospero folded his arms and stared out into the shining spaces of the sky, as if reading things written on the air that no one else could see. “Generally I leave the gods and the dead to deal with their own affairs, but I fear my son will be angry. You may find yourself in trouble.” Then he set off down the pyramid—straight down its steep side—calling out behind him, “Come along now—plenty more to see. . . .”

  The noon sun beat down, reminding January that he’d had no breakfast, and the thin air had a sparkly quality, like the onset of migraine. Don Prospero insisted on climbing all five pyramids, though the middle three—which had formerly supported the temples of the Moon, the Stars, and the Rain—were much worn down, that of the Stars being barely more than a shallow hill. “I dug up that statue of Tezcatlipoca here. . . . Here’s where I found Coatlique, the slut. . . . Worse than Helen of Troy, she was. . . . Why Menelaus didn’t simply repudiate her I’ll never understand. Would have saved everybody trouble. Take a look at that bas-relief: see how the heart itself is singing in the priest’s hand?”

  Doña Filomena wailed and sobbed and swore she must stop and rest, but when she did so, Don Prospero signed to two of the vaqueros who had accompanied them up the pyramids and they pulled her to her feet and dragged her: Hannibal stumbled along behind them in chalky-lipped silence. Though he looked better than he had the previous winter in New Orleans, he was still not strong; January had to put a hand under his elbow and half carry him up the last slope of the Pyramid of the Sun.

  “The beaten road, which those poor slaves with weary footsteps tread,” quoted the fiddler faintly, his breath rasping in his throat. “Who travel to their home among the dead. Occasionally the thought of the prison in Mexico City does cross my mind displaying certain charms.”

  “You wouldn’t like it,” said January as his friend sank to the ground at the pyramid’s top. He unslung from around his neck the water-bottle he’d taken from his saddle—nearly empty now—and handed it to him; a few feet away, Doña Filomena clung to Don Rafael and loudly proclaimed that she was about to die. Looking around, January saw that instead of wailing and protesting and demanding to be permitted to stay behind, Valentina had merely fallen back from the others and was nowhere to be seen. He walked to the edge of the pyramid’s level crown and looked down the slope, in time to see the girl’s slim figure—black against the saffron and buff of the land—vanish into the dense belt of trees that lay along the north.

  Curious, he walked farther along the foundation-stones of the old temple at the pyramid’s top and caught sight of that black dress again far below. Ordinarily the leaves of the heavily wooded depression would have hidden her, but it was late in the year, and the oak at whose feet she knelt—at least, he thought she was kneeling—stood at the edge of a little clearing where the broken statue of a jaguar lay on its side.

  Although he wouldn’t swear to it, January thought he saw Valentina take something from beneath her manga and slip it in among the roots of the oak.

  EIGHT

  Returning to Hacienda Mictlán, January found Lupe’s rabbit still enjoying rollicking good health.

  “Whatever ended up in Fernando’s tea,” sighed Rose, poking a tuft of maguey-flowers through the cage’s bamboo bars and glancing up as January came into their room, “—if it was in fact in the tea—it wasn’t put into the caddy in the kitchen. I managed to talk Guillenormand into giving me a sample of the contents of the other caddy—the jasmine and rose-hip blend Fernando drank to settle his stomach—and it seems to have been equally benign.”

  She got to her feet and staggered, catching herself on the bedpost. January set down the tray he’d brought from the kitchen and caught her arm. “It’s nothing,” said Rose, rubbing her knees through her skirts. “In between checking on Compair Lapin’s health”—she nodded toward the dozing bunny—“and making discreet enquiries about that green Meissen tea-service, I spent the greater part of the day in the chapel with Doña Josefa, which eventually earned me her account of her father’s bout of madness and her brother’s death.”

  She sat on the bed and pulled up her skirts and petticoats to feel gingerly at her knee-caps. “They tell me St. Jerome prayed so much, he acquired knees like a camel’s, but they didn’t mention what his back must have felt like after a long day at the altar.” She unclipped her garters and rolled down her stockings, and January exclaimed in alarm at the bluish bruises just below the patella, where the flesh would have pressed to the stone of the chapel floor.

  “Paloma told me—she was part of the jolly little gathering in the chapel as well—that both she and her mother routinely faint after a few hours of this. If I hadn’t encountered this kind of thing elsewhere, I’d suspect that Doña Josefa was as mad as her father. Did M’sieu Guillenormand send that food along with you? How kind of him . . . since of course Doña Josefa doesn’t eat a mid-day comida. . . .”

  “She’s her father’s daughter, anyway.” January brought the tray over to the bed: a brioche, fresh butter garnished with mint-leaves in a little Sèvres pot, a noble wedge of Brie de Meaux, and two exquisitely sweet French Faro apples, plus a carafe of Reisling that wouldn’t have been out of place at a Montmartre inn. “Don Prospero doesn’t seem to get hungry and assumes that no one else does either. . . . But you didn’t have to do that.”

  “Well, in fact, I did,” said Rose. “Another woman I would have asked to tea and gossip, or engaged on a mutual sewing project—much as I hate sewing—but somehow I knew that wouldn’t do, with Doña Josefa. One needs to spend time in company before confidences begin to flow. I’m quite all right. Mostly what I felt was boredom, and a nagging consciousness of fraud. But I couldn’t very well tell my hostess that I don’t believe God has the slightest interest in how many hours human beings put in on their knees.”

  She buttered a chunk of the brioche as she spoke. Down below them, the steady thump-thump of the workroom looms that made up the daytime heartbeat of the casco was silent with siesta; the chatter of the women around the lower arcade was stilled as well. Even the vaqueros had retired to the shade to sleep.

  “Thank goodness they decorate their altars like a hashish-eater’s dream—at least there was plenty to look at. Though I’ll admit I could not avoid the resentful reflection that you, who go to confession and actually enjoy prayer, should be the one to clamber about the countryside in quest of pagan deities, while I—a pagan or the next thing to it—should be condemned to spend the morning in prayer and much of the afternoon admiring Josefa’s collection of sacred ironmongery. Do you know she wears a belt of nails under her clothing, with the points turned inward so that they dig into her flesh?”

  “I wondered what it was,” said January drily. “I can smell infections and blood at five paces. She doesn’t make Paloma
do that, does she?”

  “Not yet. Paloma is ‘innocent,’ she says, though goodness knows how long that indulgence will last. Innocent or not, she makes the poor girl sleep without a blanket on a bare plank, with a block of wood for a pillow, to prepare her, she says, for her ultimate destination at the Convent of the Bleeding Heart of Mary in town. She spoke with passionate envy of Don Rafael’s sister Pilar, who will shortly be taking vows there: Paloma did not express an opinion. Because she is innocent, Josefa lets the child sleep on a flat plank rather than one with a one-inch stringer of wood nailed up the middle, and forbears to wake her up three times in the middle of the night for prayers. I will never understand Christians.”

  Anger tinged her voice, and she returned to buttering her bread and spreading the thick soft cheese upon it. January stepped to the door and listened to the silence of the court, gauging the slant of the hot bars of sunlight that splashed across the red-tiled arcade. Where the arcade angled into the wider corredor, the door of the corner room—the room that had been Fernando’s—stood slightly ajar, left by the servants who had cleaned it in Santa Anna’s wake.

  With scarcely a rustle of petticoats, Rose slipped up barefoot to his side.

  She saw the direction of his look, and they didn’t exchange a word; then, like two mischievous schoolchildren, they slipped through the door and down the arcade, past Hannibal’s room, where the fiddler lay like a dead man across his bed in the straw-smelling gloom, and down to that half-open door at the corner.

  The tidying hands of the servants had passed over it, stripping the bed, rolling up the carpets of red-and-black native weave. Alone of the bedrooms in the house, this room had an armoire, with marquetry doors that could lock, clearly of European work. The desk contained nothing but neat sheafs of blank paper in several sizes, ink, seals and wax, chamois-leather penwipers and three patent steel-nibbed pens polished clean as a British rifleman’s gun. There were also visiting-cards wrapped in paper—Fernando de Castellón, with an address on the Calle San Francisco—and a ledger bound in gilt-stamped green leather, which January slipped into his pocket. Ranged across the back of the desk were the three patent Argand-model lamps Hannibal had spoken of, still containing a little oil, and near the window—which was set high in the wall and looked onto the pyramids, not the corredor—a small blue-tiled heating-stove of German design.