A Masque of Chameleons

by Joan Van Every Frost

  They were plodding wearily up through the hot afternoon, by now dulled to even the most spectacular of the blooming plants and mountain vistas that had begun to fill the landscape, when there was a shout from behind and they turned to see a distant cloud of dust approaching them rapidly. Even at that it took half an hour for the dust to resolve itself into a company of lancers with shining plumed helmets winking in the sun and bright pennons fluttering atop their lances. Jason moved forward to meet them.

  There was obviously some difference of opinion, because Jason shook his head, pointed up the road, and finally shrugged. At last the lancers galloped by single file, there being no other way for them to pass the vehicles. A landslip from the rainy season of the previous summer had narrowed the road so that there was room for no more than one vehicle at a time for some distance ahead.

  “Damn fools,” Jason grumbled as he caught up with them again after talking to the coachmen. Hugh was hanging out the window asking what had happened. “We’re supposed to clear off the road so that His Majesty El Presidente can get by us in his fancy carriage.”

  One of their coachmen, a Texan named Ephraim, spoke up. “His nibs must be in a tarnation hurry then. All the time I bin on this route I ain't niver seed him travel in aught but thet there see-dan chair with all the fancy gold work on it.”

  Another swirl of dust now neared them. They could make out a second company of lancers and a light carriage drawn at a full gallop by white horses gone gray with sweat and dust.

  Jason rode on back again, presumably to explain that the coaches would get out of the way as soon as they possibly could. Short of plunging down the half-mile-deep barranca below, there was right now nowhere to go.

  “The bastard talked to me like a servant,” Jason fumed later. “I told him if his administration was worth a damn, the landslide would have been repaired months ago. I could see he was debating whether to shoot me or laugh, but in the end he laughed and invited us for an audience at the presidential palace. What a treat, I can hardly wait,” he ended sarcastically.

  “Hugh will be happy,” she remarked. “Just don't tell him you sassed El Presidente, or he’ll have a heart attack.”

  When the road widened, the lancers and the carriage dashed by in a roil of dust that frosted with ochre the coaches, their occupants, and the sweating horsemen. A supercilious white-gloved hand waved languidly at them as the carriage disappeared from view in its own dust.

  *

  One of the mules had gone lame, and it was full night by the time they pulled into Jalapa, a pretty little mountain town lying asleep in the light of a young moon. Behind it could be seen the snowy peak of Orizaba and the dark outline of the pine-covered Cofre de Perote. Stunned with weariness, they walked stifflegged across the cobbles of the inn courtyard.

  “By God, nuts in a shaker was a damned good description,” Will groaned. “I don’t know where I hurt worse because I hurt all over.” He hobbled comically about like an old man.

  They all straggled thankfully through the great wooden doors to find themselves in a large raftered common room where the eight or ten people already there eyed them with undisguised curiosity. Roberta’s glance rested for a moment on a sly-looking man with a long thin face like the blade of a hatchet. She had seen him somewhere, but where? She glanced then at Jason, who was either pretending or else really hadn’t noticed the man. It may only have been her imagination, but she thought she felt an icy chill of hostility in the room despite the crackling fire in the large stone fireplace.

  Later, as they all sat down to bowls of rich thick bean soup, redolent of onion and garlic, Roberta looked once more for the hatchet-faced man but could not see him. A trestle table had been set up on sawhorses in the middle of the common room to accommodate them, and she found herself facing Jason, who looked pale and worn. She wondered if the long ride had bothered his leg; God knew it had bothered hers. She had a large raw patch behind her knee, and her bottom felt bruised to the bone.

  Partway through the main course — a piece of very tough steak covered with a smoking hot chili sauce — Jason rose silently and went out. Roberta looked around, but none of the scruffy, villainous-looking men in the common room seemed to have paid any attention. She saw no more of him that night; his half-finished plate sat at his place all through dessert, a lumpy, oversweet flan with a heavy, unpleasant fruit syrup poured over it in place of caramel.

  Sometime during the night she thought she heard horses outside and sleepily wondered if they belonged to the rough men in the common room. Did their departure perhaps have anything to do with Jason’s disappearance during supper? She rather thought it did.

  At four the next morning, pale and hurtfully sleepy, they picked reluctantly at their breakfast. There was no sign of the unprepossessing strangers. Outside, they were surprised to find the air bitter chill, and they stood about miserable and shivering as their valises were stowed aboard the coaches. Jason’s horse got his head down and began to buck, scattering them all to the edges of the courtyard while Jason let out a string of fearful oaths in Spanish that were completely unfamiliar to Roberta. Will helped her mount the mare, who then sidled about in the chill dark and irritatingly refused to stand still. At last they were all sorted out, and the teams of eight large white horses that had been changed for the tired mules trotted out onto the road.

  The sky was overcast, and dawn came only as a steady lightening of the cloudy sky until the sun rose as a circle of diffused iridescence in the otherwise gray expanse overhead. The great peak of the Mountain of the Star, which Roberta had looked forward to seeing in the clarity of the early morning, was completely invisible. As the hours passed on the now very steep, uneven road, she noticed increasingly that every now and then there was a wooden cross by one side of the road or the other, sometimes a whole cluster of them. The few she had seen the day before she thought to be memorials of travelers who had happened to die on the road through accident or disease. Now the frequency of them puzzled her.

  While passing another group of them, this time of six, “Whose graves are these and why are they here?” she asked Jason as he rode silently a little ahead of her. He hadn’t so much as wished her good morning since they had left the inn.

  “People murdered by bandits,” he answered shortly, reining in his horse.

  “Surely you’re joking.”

  He displayed the first hint of humor since Veracruz. “I never joke at this hour of the morning, especially if I’ve been gotten up at four. What do you think we have the escort for?”

  On both sides of their way grew thick forests of dark pine trees, interspersed with lush clearings brilliant with purple and white flowering vines, tall scarlet flowers, and green underbrush that looked something like wild blackberry. Occasionally there would be an open grassy slope where sometimes cattle and goats grazed, and from time to time an isolated farmhouse of adobe plastered with lime. A misty rain had begun to fall when they heard a shout from the escort far enough ahead to be out of sight around a bend. There followed a shot and the sound of running horses. Jason’s bay was already clearing the corner at a dead run, but the other hoofbeats were still discernible when he came trotting back to her.

  “I don’t like it. They attacked right on the edge of a long grassy slope and then took off across the hill with Guy and Gavin and our escort right on their heels. Why would they attack here, and attack an armed escort at that, when they had all those miles of excellent cover? It doesn’t smell right.”

  He walked his horse back alongside the coaches, peering into the trees on either side. “Can you shoot?” he asked Roberta abruptly.

  “My father taught me how. He said women needed to know about guns as much as men did. I haven’t shot one for years, though.”

  He nodded. “No matter. Just so you can pull a trigger without shooting your own foot off. Here.” He handed her a stubby little derringer. “You probably won’t be able to hit anything with it, it’s made for close combat, but the more noise,
the better.” He turned in the saddle. “Hey, Eph, brought your gun?”

  The coachman grinned and pulled out a large Colt pistol. “I hope to tell you, mister. Jim!” he called to the other coachman. “Git out yore iron.”

  Will climbed up the side of the coach and rummaged about in the valises, coming up with another Colt. He crouched down then among the baggage, hardly even the top of his dark red head visible. A horse whickered from somewhere off to the left. Jason pulled his bay into the forest and disappeared. Roberta followed to find him kneeling behind a tree. He was sighting his gun at a point in the woods back of the coaches. Ephraim and his fellow coachmen whipped up the horses, and the coaches began to move ponderously off, gaining speed, toward the turn in the road and the open slope beyond. By the time they reached the bend, they were going flat out, their noise all but covering a crashing in the dead branches and pine cones under the trees.

  A group of horsemen burst into sight then from the gloom under the trees. Roberta had time to note with surprise that the horses were of excellent quality. The men wore wide-brimmed hats and serapes over their shoulders, almost a uniform among horsemen rich or poor, but ornate silver trouser buttons glinted in the gray light of the overcast sky, marking their attackers as among the well-to-do.

  As a shot cracked from the near coach, one of the attacking horsemen clapped his hand to his shoulder and yelled. There was another blast so close to Roberta that her ears rang. She pulled the trigger on her own gun, not knowing where or at whom she was shooting. The coaches had disappeared around the bend, but the raiders now turned to face Jason, the unseen enemy behind them. Jason let off another shot and a rider clutched himself, doubling over in the saddle. The ambushers’ horses were milling now, the horsemen seemingly reluctant to give up. Shots came then from the bend where the two coachmen and Will had returned to provide a nasty cross fire. There were oaths, and another horseman fell before they put their mounts at a run toward the nearby trees and disappeared as rapidly as they had appeared.

  Jason stood up and began to lead his horse toward the several fallen men, his limp now more pronounced. Two of the men, Roberta thought, might be in their thirties, perhaps early forties, and one of them, she noticed without surprise, was the hatchet-faced man she had seen at the inn.

  “Do you recognize him?” she asked Jason quietly, so as not to be heard by Will and the coachmen, who were fast approaching.

  “No. Do you know him?”

  “He was a seaman on the Priscilla.”

  “It figures,” was his only comment as the others came up on them.

  “Waal, them there’s a couple what won’t be bothering honest folk again,” Ephraim said with satisfaction.

  Roberta turned to see Jason looking down at a third casualty. The boy, perhaps eighteen, was still alive, though there was a hole in his shirt near the middle of his chest out of which oozed a small steady stream of blood. He had skinned and dirtied one side of his face, along which ran a tear track. He had obviously been very handsome, but his face now bore the look of a small child who had fallen and bruised himself. At any moment, it seemed, he’d get up and seek the comfort of his mother. He opened his mouth to say something, but the sound was muffled in the bright red bubble of blood that emerged from between his lips. There was an inarticulate groan, then his eyes glazed and he was gone. A dark wing had brushed across all of them, its chill touch contracting their hearts and freezing their movements.

  “Bon dieu” Hugh whispered, shaken.

  While they waited for the escort to return, the men fell to with the shovels they had carried for the more mundane expectation of digging the coaches out of the mud. They buried all three bodies in a shallow grave on which they piled rocks from the nearby slope. Hugh stuck a rough cross of pine boughs in among the rocks and finally they set out again. The misty rain had already rinsed the rocks and begun to cling in silver beads to the arms of the rude cross.

  That night at Tepayahualco Roberta saw Jason going out to check on the horses, and followed him through the thin rain that was still falling. The shed was warm and gave off the earthy smell of hay and dung. The horses stamped their feet and from time to time snorted softly. Jason swung around as she touched his shoulder, and in the dim light of the old lantern his face looked old and hard, the cicatrix like a fresh wound.

  “What did it mean?” she demanded. “What were they trying to do? They weren’t just robbers, were they?”

  “With those horses?” He laughed harshly. “I’m surprised they weren’t riding matched chestnuts like Santa Anna’s bodyguard.” He stood regarding her seriously, slightly off balance as he favored his lame leg. “Are you sure you want to go on with this? After Puebla there will be no turning back. We fooled them at Veracruz, which is why they were willing to risk everything to search us for the list they think I have, but at Puebla they’ll be waiting, and once they know you exist, they’ll never stop even if you do.”

  “I would have thought your purpose was stronger than this, to try to change my mind. Have I stopped being indispensable?” In her mind’s eye she could see the dying young man, and she was at once both angry and afraid.

  He reached out and tipped her chin up, forcing her to look into his eyes. “I didn’t try to kill that boy, you know,” he said gently. “It’s enough I’ve got him and Carmelita as well on my conscience without adding you too.”

  She shook her head stubbornly.

  “All right then,” he said roughly. “Just remember that after Puebla I can’t promise to be able to set you free, I can’t even help you much if there’s trouble. I’m going to bring that bastard down if it’s the last thing I do, and God help whoever is in my way.”

  CHAPTER VII

  During the next two days they climbed up out of the pine forests and onto a high barren plateau with scrub grass and occasional cactus. The wind blew constantly, and the snowy dome of Orizaba brooded over all. The distances were so vast that they seemed not even to be moving at all, the gray hills at the edges of the horizon appearing to come no closer. Cruz Blanca, Ojo de Agua, Nopalucan, Acajete, Amozoc came and went, one lonely, isolated little village after another, marked only by stays at small dirty inns, little more than spirit shops, that made the inn at Jalapa seem like a palace. All but imperceptibly, the endless plain gave way to scattered dwarf pine trees, sparse cultivated fields, and thicker pine forest as they approached the city of Puebla de los Angeles. They had seen no one along the way except for the occasional wild-looking arrieros with their strings of laden mules, twice a diligence traveling in the opposite direction, a few ragged Indians afoot or swaying along on the backs of tiny gray burros, and several times in the distance lone riders who belonged to small bleak ranchos along the way. To the right Orizaba watched them, white and enigmatic; on the left now was Malinche, a dark pine-forested mountain whose lower slopes, barren of trees, were planted with some kind of crops.

  Late in the afternoon they clopped and rumbled over the cobblestones of Puebla, too tired to pay much attention even to the great cathedral as they trotted listlessly across the main plaza. With audible groans of relief they saw that their inn was clean and warm, positively sumptuous compared to the recent wayside stops they had endured.

  “I could stay here forever,” Roberta groaned. “Don’t wake me in the morning.”

  Rosemary lazily soaped an arm in a tub alongside. “A pity hot water always has to turn cold.”

  “Don’t even tell me about it. I don’t want to think that this will ever end.” Roberta wiggled her toe6. “Do you suppose heaven could be a perpetual hot bath? That would be enough to make one terribly religious, don’t you think?”

  When they all gathered for an early dinner, their fingers were still wrinkled from the long immersion. As dish followed dish and one wine after another appeared, their faces flushed and the volume of talk rose until they were happily shouting at each other. Even Hugh, who tended to fuss whenever he thought they mightn’t be at their best the next day, was sloppi
ng his wine on the table along with the rest of them as they proposed ridiculous toasts that became more obscene as the evening wore on.

  Roberta saw with consternation that Will was quite drunk, drunker even than Jessica, who was quietly singing to herself, a calm, faraway look on her face. With a shiver she realized Jessica was singing over and over again Ophelia’s song from Hamlet:

  “He is dead and gone, lady,

  He is dead and gone;

  At his head a grass-green turf,

  At his heels a stone.

  “White his shroud as the mountain snow,

  Larded with sweet flowers;

  Which bewept to the grave did go

  With true-love showers.”

  Will, not paying any attention, was arguing loudly with Guy about a love potion a witch had given him some years back.

  As the evening wore on, Will grew drunker and drunker, Jessica wandered off to bed, the bit players had a hot game of monte going, and Daphne had excused herself long since. There were pools of wax on the table from the shortening candles, and though the serving girls had cleaned up the food and soiled dishes, cigar ashes and spilled wine were scattered down the dark wood. Roberta sat in a pleasant daze composed of weariness and a little too much wine, only half listening to what was going on around her.

  “Chepina, you’re an extraordinary woman.”

  “Oh indeed? In what way, pray tell?”

  At the same time Roberta realized that what she was overhearing was in Spanish, it also occurred to her that Jason was leading up to something. Endearing nicknames were not his usual style. Was he going to enlist Josefina’s aid as well? He could do worse.

  “One could begin with your eyes; they’re the eyes of a lioness. I think perhaps you have the claws of a lioness as well. Am I right, gatita?” The rich voice had gone a little husky, and he was smiling playfully.

  Enlist her aid indeed, Roberta laughed to herself. She hadn’t thought the sour old tomcat had it in him. She especially enjoyed it all because she knew that Will had had his eye on Josefina and would have tried to spirit her offlong since if he hadn’t gotten so drunk.